1,573 words
As Black History Month slowly creeps up on us like four straight weeks of rape and basketball, I find it incumbent to remind everyone that since a strict definition of “history” means “events that were recorded” rather than simply “events that happened,” there is very little actual history from sub-Saharan Africa because its denizens were so hopelessly backwards, they never got around to inventing simple things such as written languages with which to record the things that were happening around them.
One of the things in black history that never really happened — at least not in the way its modern proponents appear to wish it did — is the “We Wuz Kangz” meme, which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has awarded the honorific of being a “hate symbol,” although it’s not really a symbol, which I suppose is fitting because it never really happened, anyway. According to the ADL, “We Wuz Kangz” and its various iterations and spellings constitute
a racist catchphrase and collection of memes directed at African-Americans and other people of sub-Saharan African descent. Originating in 2015 and popularized by the website 4chan, the phrase is a racist shorthand reference to discredited but popular Afrocentric theories that claimed sub-Saharan Africans were descended from ancient Egyptians. . . . The phrase and meme are intended to mock the Afrocentric theories and, by extension, anyone who might believe in them. Users employ phrases such as “We Wuz Kangs,” “We Wuz Kings,” and “Kings N Shiet,” featuring [a] mock black American dialect that is intended to portray blacks as ignorant and a contrast to the ostensibly more civilized ancient Egyptians.
As we all know but very few of us are brave enough to admit in public, Black History Month is an opportunity for blacks to feel unreasonably great about their past. Now, on one level I can empathize with the idea that if my people’s past was one extended sick joke of failure and suffering, I’d struggle with self-esteem, too. There is very little in the long and sordid past of Africans that would engender self-esteem in any normal, sane person. But the problem is that blacks have tremendous self-esteem, and many studies have shown that self-esteem and success may be inversely correlated. So blacks aren’t doing themselves any favors by lying to themselves about some imagined glorious past where they were all kings. Anything built on a foundation of lies is bound to end in disaster.
Did you ever notice that when some fool goes to a psychic wishing to hear whose body they occupied in a previous incarnation, the psychic never tells them they come from a long and uninterrupted line of undistinguished and utterly miserable peasants? As luck would have it, they were all descended from famous kings and warriors and men of distinction. What are the odds?
Saying that all black people are descended from kings is like saying that most white people owned slaves or were in the Klan. As much as many white people may wish this had been true, it simply wasn’t.
The blunt, brutish fact is that there has never been an all-king society. Is someone seriously trying to allege that in these ancient African kingdoms, no one had butlers? Carriage drivers? Archers? Hired hands to clean the slurry pit? You were all kings? That’s mathematically impossible. It’s simple math, but I’m talking about fundamentally simple people who aren’t good at math.
The average “society” in sub-Saharan Africa before the white man gifted it with alphabets and air conditioning was more likely to be a roving nomadic pack of about 30 or so naked Africans led by a single warlord. If you want to refer to a tribal warlord as a “king,” knock yourself out, but even being generous, that means that only one in 30 modern American blacks may be descended from a tribal warlord, whereas the rest are descended from violent naked Africans who would have probably responded to a written manuscript by trying to eat it.
In retrospect, I suppose that “We was kings” is a more comforting thought than “We was slaves” or “We was dumb.”
If one wishes to claim that the modern sloe-eyed gangsta moron you see at Dollar Tree trying to hack a clerk to death with a machete is descended from the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids, there’s quite a lot of stupidity to unpack there.
It’s like the Afrocentrists who insist that blacks built the United States. Black laborers may have helped to build this country, but they sure as hell didn’t design it. And let me tell you — it’s the designing-it part, not the building-it part, that’s important. Same thing applies to the pyramids. If all it took to build flourishing civilizations and dizzying architectural marvels was animal brawn, why do the arid wastelands south of the Sahara more resemble a dirty hamster cage than Wakanda?
You can buy Jim Goad’s Answer Me! here.
But even if all your unfounded self-esteem hinges on the idea that Egypt from 4,500 years ago was just bursting at the seams with flat-nosed, big-lipped architectural geniuses, the humiliating fact is that the slave markets that provided the raw, purplish muscle needed to pick cotton in what is now modern Alabama mostly existed about 4,000 miles away from Cairo and about 4,000 years after the pyramids were built.
And even if, for the sake of equity, we want to pretend that at some dim point in a long-forgotten past, Africa was packed top-to-bottom with bustling nations filled with nothing but kings and queens, this raises another question:
WHAT HAPPENED?
You was kings? Okay, then what the hell happened? How did you go from a golden age of all-king kingdoms to the embarrassing mess that is modern Africa and every place in the United States with a Martin Luther King Boulevard?
One of Don Rickles’ all-time favorite insults was telling a celebrity, “You were a big star once.” I feel like saying something similar to anyone who unironically spouts the “We wuz kangz” line. “Okay, you were kings once. But oh, how the kingly have fallen!”
The 1996 documentary film When We Were Kings is about the legendary 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” between boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the latter of whom was considered unbeatable at the time, whereas Ali had already been beaten by two boxers that Foreman obliterated. To maximize profits for Western viewing, the match was held in the middle of the night in Zaire, which is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the planet’s undisputed shittiest nations. The match was partially funded by Zaire’s ruthless dictator Mobotu Sese Seko, whose henchmen were known to gouge out the eyes, amputate the limbs, and rip out the genitals of political opponents. I suppose that if he’d been a king rather than a dictator, he would have been far more benevolently disposed toward his subjects. Even better, if Zaire had been one of those all-king nations, there would have been no lowly subjects to torture.
Ali fought a brilliant fight, outsmarting a bigger and stronger boxer by letting Foreman punch himself into exhaustion, whereupon Ali knocked the big dumb lug out in the eighth round.
But on that night in that packed stadium, there was only one king: Muhammad Ali. There wasn’t a whole stadium filled with African kings. That would have been stupid. And Ali’s victory once more demonstrated that intelligence trumps brawn, even in a brawny discipline such as fisticuffs.
Legend has it that when a reporter subsequently asked Ali, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?”, Ali responded, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”
By the way, it was those legendary “kings” — or, more properly, “tribal chieftains” — who shoved the hapless Bantu people of Central and Western Africa onto those boats. So although you aren’t all descended from kings, if your black ancestors were enslaved in North America, they were all sold into bondage by African kings, as painful and humiliating and flustering and mentally discombobulating as it may be to hear it.
As far as I can discern, there are still three kings in modern Africa. The first, King Mohammed VI of Morocco, doesn’t look black at all. Then again, Morocco is separated from the Dusky Southern Lands of the Bantu by the massive Sahara Desert, meaning that when it comes to human evolution, Africa might as well be two different continents.
The other two Modern Kangz are King Letsie III of Lesotho, who presides over a throbbing shithole with the world’s third-lowest life expectancy, behind only Chad and the Central African Republic. His nation’s nominal per-capita Gross Domestic Product is roughly three dollars a day. The other Modern Kang is King Mswati III of Eswatini, which until recently was known as Swaziland. Nearly a third of his country’s adults are HIV-positive, and they have the twelfth-lowest life expectancy on the planet.
In fact, the 27 countries with the lowest life expectancy in the world are all in Africa.
The 28th is Haiti, which serves as a living example of what happens when you export African Kangz elsewhere.
Left to their own devices, Africans never amounted to much of anything. Modern blacks across the planet are mostly descended from people equally as dysfunctional and unsuccessful as they are. It may not be what they wanted to hear, but they need to hear it.
And I’m announcing it to them with love — the kind of cynical, grizzled love that can only come from someone descended from an alcoholic Irish plumber.
* * *
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35 comments
Excellent essay that I’m sure will be presented in most public educational institutions to help the young understand the history of our basketball-Americans.
All these years and Jim Goad still hasn’t lost the knack for mixing honest commentary with facetious and genuinely novel humour. Keep it up, Goad.
True no butlers, carriage drivers or archers, but I’m sure they had a plethora of court jesters doing an unintentionally hilarious Sepnfetchit impersonation.
And the all important dick washers as well. Every kangdom had them.
https://www.stupidedia.org/stupi/Urologe
I would neither want a dick washer nor be a dick washer of any dick but mine.
I don’t know, Eddie Murphy had it pretty good in Coming To America.
He even had royal wipers
Left to their own devices, Africans never amounted to much of anything..”
Back in the late 90s the BBC made a series entitled Great Railway Journeys. In one of the episodes they follow that most vile negroid Henry Louis Gates Jr (the same one that caused the confrontation with the policeman that resulted in O’Bummer having a beer summit with said policeman) as he takes the family on a trip to Tanzania to visit the village he had worked at in the 60s when in the peace corps. And he’s so excited he’s almost about to bust one until they arrive at the village. It’s like time had stood still. 30 years later there is only the single water tap that he and the other peace corps losers installed and all the “houses” are peeling the paint those same losers applied.
African languages traditionally have no words for time periods because like animals they only live in the present.
Guess what the swahili word for January is? That’s right: Januari
Africans did invent algebra but we stole it from them. Yes, we did an inverse
Vulcan mind meld and sucked it out. That’s what I’ve been told.
That meme has always made me wonder how one “steals” knowledge. So, not only did we take their knowledge and do exponentially more with it than they ever dreamed of, but we also somehow simultaneously did some Vulcan mind-meld and made them forget all of the things they had learned. I mean, I know we whites are good but are we THAT good??
When they were kings, is that when they started putting plates in their lips?
Yes, they have some exceptional techniques to beautify themselves. Give credit where the credit is due.
I believe they were the first to come up with the bone through the nose, too. Definitely a gift for accessorizing.
Not forgetting of course, the multiple metal hoops around the neck – now that’s class!
Tres chic.
And let’s not forget the earrings fashioned from warthog scrotums.
Having a plate in (or behind) your lip is culturally far superior to being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, particularly when all “The Gibs” come on a plate!
Home run article that nails every note.
If you want to refer to a tribal warlord as a “king,” knock yourself out, but even being generous, that means that only one in 30 modern American blacks may be descended from a tribal warlord, whereas the rest are descended from violent naked Africans who would have probably responded to a written manuscript by trying to eat it.
It’s quite plausible that the ratio is far higher than 1 in 30. Precivilization was and is characterized by a sexual dynamic of extreme harem building/hypergamy whereby the strongest and most violent male (shotcaller) does as — and who — he pleases, and the lesser males (soldiers) do as they must.
This dynamic persists in modern ghettos, where the warlords of old have been supplanted by roughly block-level shotcallers.
The match was partially funded by Zaire’s ruthless dictator Mobotu Sese Seko, whose henchmen were known to gouge out the eyes, amputate the limbs, and rip out the genitals of political opponents.
That would be “The Death of Pierre Mulele“, which I read somewhere, but can’t confirm, was made into a live TV show before a studio audience.
Just brainstorming, but if one were to adapt a US version, I could see titular roles for such pro-savagery activists as DA Thomas Binger or attorney Steve Schleicher. It’s what they’re fighting for after all.
Yeah I was bothered by the logic of the “ non king” ancestry claim too. It’s possible they all descended from a king or dictator chief who killed all the other men and impregnated all the women at some point. Many tribes behave this way. 10% of the world are supposedly genghis khans kids, who could be considered a king of sorts. All you have to do is go back far enough to find a genetic bottleneck and some patriarch may have sired all of the descendants. Of course few Africans can follow this logic. The book A Troublesome Inheritance seems to claim that the wealthy aristocrats repopulated Europe after the plague, since the peasants were contracting it from working with animals , not cooking their food, and not drinking boiled water, thereby dying and taking their lower IQ with them. So we wuz aristocrats at some point as well.
Evola thought that the Africans aren’t less evolved but more de-evolved, as in they once had a civilization in the depths of time and then fell as hard as property values fall when the diversity arrives. This ended their era of not-so-mono monarchies. We Whites at least were elector countz and dukes until recently.
Sub-Saharan Africans may have devolved through intermixing with an archaic human species, possibly homo-erectus. Are sub-Saharan Africans a separate species from Europeans?
https://www.science.org/content/article/mysterious-ghost-populations-had-multiple-trysts-human-ancestors
https://subspecieist.com/archaic-hominins/west-africans-dna/
“We Whites at least were elector countz and dukes until recently”
the standart cope argument every monarchist falls back on when he imagines himself not as the serf in this scenario, but at least a knight or something. Fact is white countries were ruled by casts of white monarchs who were foreigners to these lands and the bemoaned WASP elite of old america did so too, seeing themselves different and the decendents of the true monarchs.
“Then again, Morocco is separated from the Dusky Southern Lands of the Bantu by the massive Sahara Desert, meaning that when it comes to human evolution, Africa might as well be two different continents.”
The Sahara desert at times becomes more humid and transforms into grasslands so it would be much easier to cross during those periods. Some speculation has it that tropical disease in sub-Saharan Africa was as much a barrier to genetic interaction between northern and sub-Saharan African human populations as was the Sahara desert.
In modern times, in contrast to the Americas, Europeans dropped like flies when they encountered African diseases for which they had no natural immunity.
The sub-Saharan Africans have lived for tens of thousands of years in the tropical environment south of the Sahara desert and have adapted to the diseases present there. Perhaps their hybridization with an older species of hominid (that had lived there for a long time before them) helped them survive and adapt to the environment?
So, even when the Sahara was a humid grassland (as recently as 5 or 6 thousand years ago) any northerners who made their way south possibly faced a quick disease ridden death and an end to their lineage. The sub-Saharan Africans lived in a banana rich tropical forest filled with tasty monkeys so they would have had no reason to head north into the grasslands or the desert. So, in these ways the two worlds remained separate and in balance. Genetic research shows the two groups have been genetically separated for something on the order of 70,000 years.
One day, perhaps several millennia from now, the grasslands will return to the Sahara and this time the sub-Saharan’s might forego their banana and monkey tropical paradise and venture north, migrating into Northern Africa eventually overrunning the European continent. When they discover that this new world is void of banana trees and monkeys we can only hope that they retreat back to their paradise south of the Sahara and the two worlds again find themselves separate and in balance.
This article was so good, I read it three times. Excellent writing–and it was HILARIOUS!
Thank you.
Here in Caucasus every “tribal” leader called himself “prince”.
I think every people, either black or white, or red, or yellow, or even blue and green, which loudly boast about their ancestors, when in reality have nothing to be proud of TODAY, moreover, when such people have lost everything or much of what the ancestors have achieved, in reality or imagination, are simply pathetic. If you have nothing to be proud of YOUR OWN achievements of today, you should just shut up rather than brag of something which other people have done long before you were born. Well, imagined great ancestors make the situation seem even worse than real ones, but, looking from another point of view, I would say that in reality it is much worse when some people or race REALLY have had great ancestors and great achievements and have LOST ALL OF THAT, than of the ancestors and achievements were simply fictitious; in the last case the loss is not so grave,
Contra that, recognition of one’s forebears’ demigod accomplishments is a source of great inspiration. And it can be one mix of jet fuel that our side’s tanks consume as their tracks crush over our enemies’ prostrate bones.
Yes, but only when YOU YOURSELF ARE DOING SOMETHING. Only speaking about heroic (both mythic or real) deeds of ancestors does not help much. What it is worth to tell heroic stories about Mete, or Kürşad, or Bilge, or Kültegin, or even Ospan Baatyr, when NOW Ürümçi and the whole Eastern Türkistan is in Chinese hands and we cannot do anything against it, when Al Assad kills Türkmen in Halep with Chlore and Bombs, when Qirim activists are arrested by Russian secret police, and so on… Great ancestors are cool, but now we have to get new and real heroes.
To the point about blacks’ self-esteem, I would take issue.
Blacks actually have very low self-esteem. What they have in tsunami-sized abundance is ego. The difference is, to use ordinary language, is that ego is what you tell to other people, esteem is what you tell to yourself.
Despite their ever growing attempts to psyche themselves out by referring to their imaginary kingly ancestors, most blacks betray their true preferences in things like buying skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and over consumption of luxury products and even in their choice of victims of their crimes (Other blacks). They routinely use the N-word that whites are forbidden to use because they know, deep in their bones, that they are exactly what they call each other.
This is the most brutal thing I’ve read in a while (and I read the weekly “Worst Week Yet”).
As someone already rightly said: hilarious!
P.S. Nobody can convince me that the ADL staffer who had to describe the “We Wuz Kangz” meme didn’t secretly relish being able to state the message expressed by it.
I think you may right, considering that the ADL doesn’t just describe the meme but also provides a half dozen hilarious examples. I particularly liked the Martin Luther Kang.
I hadn’t seen that picture, just read the block quote here! Lol
And SPLC does bix nood.
No, that’s yellow racism, because Kang was of course a Chinese.
The best thing about the 2020-21 lockdown was it made me read books I had that I would never normally read. One was the Book of the Dead. Imagine my surprise, when early in the book, in the prefatory material (1960, Citadel Press, page 22), they said an “early pharoah” heard of pygmies, and demanded one would be brought to him so the pygmy could dance for him! Who ever thought ancient literature could be that entertaining! So, if the pharoah was black, would the pharoah do that? Maybe, maybe not, but imagine Trump hearing of a pygmy and making him come and dance for him. Imagine him not doing that, you can’t! I’m sure it’s happened plenty of times. Therefore I’m pretty sure that that early pharoah was not black.
So, if the pharoah was black, would the pharoah do that?
Who knows? African tribes have always seen pygmies as animals, not as humans, and hunted them like animals. There were no such thing as “black solidarity” in Africa, as there has never been “Islamic unity” – and it does not exist today.
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