Out of Africa

It is thought that the first humans emerged in Africa long before homo sapiens. This was quite a while back, about two million years ago. Prior to that we had a long line of ancestry which, ultimately, may trace back to one common progenitor, a clump of cells incapable of thought, reason or offence and from whom we could learn much. Well, not much, actually, it being just a clump of cells and all that, but one of the games humans play is a search for meaning and so far we have found none.

No evidence of a creator, no matter how much you might need there to be one. No evidence of purpose, although even when talking about evolution we often reverse engineer an intent, when perhaps we should be thinking purely in terms of beneficial but accidental mutations. That is, a species doesn’t somehow deliberately evolve a defence from predators; rather a mutation which gives a survival advantage tends to be passed on, whereas the weaklings get eaten. It is a genetic fact that if your grandparents did not survive to procreate, then neither will you.

Everything is linked in a long chain which stretches back way before difference. And one of the things which unites all humans is opportunism. A trait we developed well before there was such a thing as skin tone variance was the ability to spot a way of earning a living by exploiting the weaknesses of others. Other species, slow to escape our murderous clutches and eventually other humans, too slow to realise we were putting them to work.

So, I’ve been doing some research and as the ancestors of those who are claiming reparation for the trans-generational trauma of slavery are almost certainly my ancestors too, I want in on the action. Where is MY compensation for missing out on the experience of being a slave by ancestry? If the descendants of my ancestors were enslaved I must be a due a cut of any compensation coming and if you simultaneously say, ah but you are white and therefore you are privileged I have to demand you explain why.

Because, according to the BPAMITWP (Black People Are More Important Than White People) movement, brown, yellow and pinky-white skins are inferior mutations of the one true blackness. And whites in particular are a weak and defenceless minority among the world’s humans. So, how come it’s not we who are doing the rioting? And anyway, I thought the meek were supposed to inherit the Earth.

When you think about it we are the real oppressed. Long before anybody was working the slavery gig we set off for a walk and ended up leaving Africa for cold, northern climes where we busted our balls for millennia, inventing everything worth having. Meanwhile the old folks back home evolved into slavers and started setting their captives to tilling the fields and building the mud huts. It must have been a high old life, sunning it on the savannas while we were ploughing through cold, wet mud and rain.

But we persevered and eventually invented the foreign holiday whereby we discovered that our cousins had not been idle… or, rather, they had. What’s this? Get other people to do things for you without paying, you say? I’ll ‘ave some of that! So, for a couple of hundred years we did what they had been doing for far longer, yet now it is we who have to cough up? That makes no sense at all. All that graft and now we have to pay compo? Sod that for a game of soldiers; let’s go looting!