“Where did they help us? They are not helping me. If the West refunds to Africa what they have looted for the past 400 years plus 25% interest… They are not giving us any aid. They are giving us something that is infinitesimal compared to what they have taken from us. So they are not giving me any aid. They are not making me any favours. Let them give back to me what they have taken for 400 hundred years and see whether I will ask them for anything. They are not giving me aid. In fact that is even an insult. If you take a bull and give me only the horns and you tell me you are helping me…that is an insult.”
Further pressed whether his fury over the West’s colonial legacy in Africa was behind his incessant criticisms, he retorted: “That is not the reason. The reason is that the West has only been ungrateful. Abject poverty drove Europeans to Africa and they exploited us for 400 years. In those years there had never been any election. There was no parliamentary system. After 400 years of looting Africa they turned around. Some of us had to take up arms and kick them out. Now they come around and give us lectures about democracy and human rights when in their own countries there is no democracy. Where is democracy for blacks in the UK or blacks anywhere in Europe? Now the so-called skin heads or neo-Nazi (far right), if they were in Africa or in the Gulf States they will be called terrorist organisations. Why are they not being called terrorist organisations and dealt with [as] they espouse the same hatred extremists also espouse towards humanity? Skin heads and extremists are all anti-human. Why are those in the Third World called terrorists and bombed and those in the West, the KKK in the US are called far-right, white supremacists? Supremacy against who? So, I am not anti-West. I am anti their hypocrisy and their racism. The British have been here for 400 years they never taught us democracy. They never had one Gambian member of the British Parliament or the colonial parliament. I had to build a National Assembly [building] the first time in the history of this country.
The British never built a high school in this country for 400 years. So, what is there for them to teach me? They came to my country and there is a place near the Atlantic Coast if you go there at 5’0 clock they arrest you as a black man in our own country. So 1,000 years up to now, the West has never been democratic. Up to today, they are not democratic because if democracy is anything to go by you have to respect the will of the people. Who do they think they are that they have to teach Africans how to be democratic when we have never colonised anybody? So this issue of Western democracy is a fallacy. It doesn’t exist. How many blacks are killed in the UK and no investigation is done? If a black man is accused of killing a white man in 24 hours he will appear in a court of law. When people rose up against the system because of police brutality in London, [British prime minister] David Cameron called them gangsters and whatever and you can see the reaction. But when two black men killed a soldier they were asking for the death penalty. Can you see the difference? A black man shooting a white man would be arrested in 24 hours in the UK but a white man killing scores of blacks will never be arrested in the next 25 years. Where is the justice? Before you point fingers at me look at yourself first .If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones”.
]]>
