NDN Support Latin America

The stone age argument

Another thing that is kind of typical with people who feel dis-dain for those "pri-mitive peoples" li-ving in the rainfo-rest, as that when it comes to their own Euro-pean stone age an-cestors, they sud-denly feel so proud of them and call them solu-trians, making up all kinds of unproven stories like they al-ready traveled the world. Well, if they

Dogon tribe: "primitive"?

Tarzan: "hero"?

did, it's pretty sad that people like Marco Polo, James Cook, Livingstone and Christopher Colum-bus had to "discover" it all over again, isn't it? The famous American boxer Mohammad Ali, in one of his speeches, told an audience how Europeans have distorted actual history and made every important person white. And come to think of it, it's true. All depictions of Adam and Eve and of Je-sus are white but who says that they were? And Ali said: "Even Tarzan, lord of the African jungle is white!" And it's also true that the very same people who make fun of tribes in their "mud-huts", admire the jungle cry of Tarzan. They even don't mind his broken English saying "Me Tar-zan, you Jane" while lecturing every foreigner they can about their spelling. They laugh at the tattoos, the koteka's, lower lip discs or nose ornaments, or about the fact that some tribes dance around a campfire. Well, at least it has some significant meaning to it. How about all those youngsters who under the influence of extacy and other pills mindlessly "dance" in some discoteque? How useful they're spending their time, right? But what do we see in our society? Primitive art gets imitated in an art style called Cobra, we invent Tarzan, we practise nudism, have tattoo's and piercings, and play the didgeridoo in our own parks. Every summer I see people playing didgeridoo's in Amsterdam and they're not Australian aboriginals.

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