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COLONIAL EXPERIENCE     O'DELL

last 90 years) had been placed on the struggle against racism, the chief ideology of colonialism.

For the past five centuries Africans have been forced to build a world of comfort, convenience and special privilege for a minority of wealth grabbers in Europe, the Americas and for the "white settlers" on the African continent. Pursuant to the construction of this world of "affluence," tens of millions of Africans were forcibly uprooted from their continental homeland and various societal institutions, put on slaveships and transported to Europe and the Americas, auctioned off to plantation lords and bankers as slaves to develop the great marketable agricultural products (sugar, cotton, tobacco, rice, etc.) which were the cornerstone of international trade.  Millions of other became the propertyless servants and cheap labor reservers for the "white settler" colonizers on the African continent, mining gold, copper and diamonds, cultivating cotton, sisal, tea and coffee on the plantations or doing domestic work in the households of the colonizers.  this relationship between the peoples of Europe and Africa is the cornerstone foundation of the "free world" of which the United States today is the chief financier and military policeman.

today the revolutionary tidal wave against racism and colonialism is destroying the wold servile relationships with their motifs of master race ideas and privileges which brought so much misery to so many millions for so long.  Equally important, it is giving birth to "a new period in world behavior" in which humanity and civilized conduct are replacing the barbarism of the past 500 years.  This new period in world behavior is not experiencing as easy, painless ascendancy.  Its emergence is being made complicated and difficult as the old dying order of things fights hard to hold back the dawn.  It is in the very nature of the times that every so often in the life of a freedom movement, periodic flashes of events tend to illuminate the whole canvas of relationships in the society, making it possible to appraise, in a fundamental way, where the oppressed and oppressor stand in relation to one another.  Such periods of illumination call for and make possible a re-appraisal of strategies; an opportunity to evaluate what shifts have taken place, a re-definition of things once assumed to be correct.  They shed light on what new contradictions may have emerged affecting the total struggle or what old contradictions are more antagonistic than previously. Such periods demand that the usefulness of certain assumptions be tested, that certain ideas be either revised or abandoned and other ideas reformulated an this whole process is developed out of experience

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