And You Thought Ahmadenijad Was Bad!

It seems that all of the world leaders are in a contest to see who can utter the most insensitive, callous and down right ignorant statements. I'm getting use to Bush, Ahmadenijad, Kim Jong-Il and Mbeki but I must say that the following statement by French President Nicholas Sarkozy has earned him a seat in their corner.

According to the Blog Racewire, Sarkozy has recently declared that Africa and Africans have no history worth speaking of.

The blog reports:

" His recent speech to students at a Dakar, Senegal University hit me like a bullet… Swiftly and burning. Painfully and shocking—and in just a few short stanzas, shattered my idea that representations of Africa and Africans were becoming less lumped and less tolerant of racism.

Before a crowd of Black faces, Sarkozy said this:

“The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. The African peasant, who for thousands of years have lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is no place for human adventure or for the idea of progress.

“In this universe where nature commands all, man escapes from the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he rests immobile in the centre of a static order where everything seems to have been written beforehand.

“The problem of Africa, and allow a friend of Africa to say it, is to be found here. Africa’s challenge is to enter to a greater extent into history. To take from it the energy, the force, the desire, the willingness to listen and to espouse its own history. Africa’s problem is to stop always repeating, always mulling over, to liberate itself from the myth of the eternal return. It is to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return because it has never existed.”

I guess the history of Timbuktu and Ancient Kush don't count. Hasn't anyone explained to him why many of the facial features of the great sphinxes have been destroyed.

And worst yet, according to the article, that madman Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa "insisted after this speech that Sarkozy is still a 'friend' of Africans and an African renaissance."

God save us all from our leaders.