When European explorers first saw the "new" world, they took it to be an "unspoiled" wilderness. In reality, many of these "natural" environments were actually highly advanced agricultural systems that were carefully tended by #indigenous people. The "natural" plenty that amazed Europeans was, in fact, the result of generations of careful tending. Europeans are only now, hundreds of years later, "rediscovering" these methods (and, in typical European fashion, naming it #permaculture , pretending they invented it, and profiting from it instead of sharing it). No only is it being rediscovered in the Americas and South Pacific, but European models are now being rediscovered.

Europeans could not believe the truth that indigenous people in the South Pacific and Americas had developed something so advanced that it took hundreds of years for colonizers to even recognize it as anything but "magic" (any sufficiently advanced technology, and all that).

What's interesting to me is that the Enlightenment thinkers that inspired #socialism and #anarchism, and many European inspired anarchists to this day, do exactly the same thing for the social technologies they observed in the Americas and argued to bring the same to Europe.

Rousseau thought that egalitarianism and liberty were just natural things, rather than things that had to be intentionally developed. The classical anarchist idea that "all we have to do is abolish the government" ignores generations of social evolution, of active development of social technology, by indigenous people. There continues to be an insurrectionary and adjacent trend within leftist thinking that still flows from this fallacy.

I've already talked about how the idea of a revolutionary as a man with a gun is patriarchal because it ignores the invisible labor of building and sustaining a revolutionary culture. This patriarchal element intertwines with Eurocentric/colonizer biases, in both cases I've mentioned. The European men who wrote about the thoughts of indigenous intellectuals in the Americas only recognized men as people in the societies they interacted with. Women who worked in agriculture were, therefore, invisible. Therefore, the entire systems they maintained *did not exist* to the colonizers. They, instead, happened naturally... Like laundry magically being folded and food magically being made.

As we figure out how to move forward from the failure of all elements of colonizer society (social, economic, technological), it's critical that we are aware of the omissions that have lead us to failure so many times in the past.

Mdou Moctar – Wiwasharnine

https://amf.didiermary.fr/mdou-moctar-wiwasharnine/

“Wiwasharnine” is from Mdou Moctar’s full length album “Ilana: The Creator” in 2019.

Born in a nomad camp in Niger and now a leading figure of desert rock, Mdou Moctar stands out as the most innovative artist in contemporary Saharan music. His unconventional interpretations of Tuareg guitar have pushed him to the forefront of […]

#Niger #Tuareg