The current simplistic “black is good, white is bad” attitude in the West partakes of a similar fashionable blindness. It denies the biblical teaching that there is no difference between the races—that all are sinners equally in need of salvation. The media continually emphasizes that the great conflict is black against white and that it is primarily the fault of the whites because blacks always lived in peace until the white man arrived on the scene. The truth, however, is that blacks fought and killed and enslaved and tortured blacks in Africa before the white man came along—and are doing so today.
It is astonishing that Louis Farrakhan could talk any blacks into becoming Muslims. It was the Muslims (Arabs) who were the first suppliers of slaves (from their well-supplied warehouses on the West African coast) to Europe and America. Moreover, it was the blacks themselves who captured and sold their own people—from other tribes, of course. All through Africa the tribes had their territories and fought their wars, as they do even today. Actually there was more peace in Africa, as distasteful as that fact may be for Africans to swallow, when the colonialists were in control than there was before or has been since the Africans have achieved independence. Lack of space prevents the enumeration of the conflicts of centuries between the many native tribes in Africa. The example of only two of those tribes so much in the news of late must suffice.
The Hutus and Tutsis have been killing one another for 400 years. The Hutus were the first to populate the area now known as Rwanda and Burundi, preceding the Tutsis by about 500 years. They were farmers. The Tutsis, who raised cattle, were the ethnic minority but held a higher place in the occupational hierarchy and had more wealth and received more preferential treatment by the colonialists. As an aftermath of the Hutu riots in 1959, however, the Belgians ceded Rwanda to the Hutus, who immediately massacred Tutsis by the tens of thousands. In Burundi the Tutsis gained control and proceeded to slaughter Hutus. The present bloodbath began in 1994:
“Rwandan Hutus went on a rampage and massacred between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsis. The Rwandese Patriotic Front, an exile Tutsi army based in Uganda, struck back and seized control of Rwanda. Two millions Hutus, terrified of Tutsi vengeance, fled to Tanzania and Zaire…[and] aid officials estimate that as many as a million displaced Hutus face death from hunger and disease.
In a worst-case scenario, the very heart of Africa could implode, sucking the 30 million people in the region…into a vortex of violence.”