Nick Fuentes and the African Wheel

well hello there a couple of weeks ago i put out a video called why didn't africa colonize europe where i attempted to answer potentially racist and slightly inaccurate question about why the colonization of africa from the 17th to 19th century was such a one-sided affair the answer i gave was essentially that europe and asia enjoyed a combination of agriculture and very expansive trade routes spanning from portugal to shanghai whereas african societies were more limited by the shape of the continent and as we're about to find out probably didn't have as much need to expand anyway but what also caught my attention was a strange number of people in the comment section pointing out that sub-saharan africans were so backwards that they hadn't invented the wheel this was a claim i had never heard before and it definitely seemed to clash with my own understanding of what these societies achieved for example there was the mali empire which was well known for the excessive wealth of its rulers in particular mansa muza who ruled in the 14th century and is often labeled as the richest man who ever lived he was so rich that historians simply describe his wealth as incalculable on his pilgrimage to mecca he visited egypt and was carried through cairo in a litter where he threw chunks of gold into the streets for an impression of how wealthy this guy was the amount of gold he threw out ended up causing an inflation crisis in egypt that lasted 12 years and then to the east there was the kingdom of aksum where the philosopher ziro jacob and his understudy wrote the hatata which translates to inquiry published in 1667 their work was basically an african enlightenment though a believer in god jacob's work brought forward the idea that stories within different religions are often contradictory and should therefore always be doubted and critically examined an idea that is often attributed today to david hume who wouldn't write it until a century later in his inquiry on miracles the book also has this quite familiar passage all men are equal in the presence of god and all are intelligent since they are his creatures he did not assign one people for life another for death one for mercy another for judgment our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist in the sight of god who is perfect in all his works the idea that men are created equal would later be attributed to john locke who wrote it 20 years later and the writers of the declaration of independence over a hundred years later the special thing about jacob was he was the only one who included black people for locke and the founding fathers slaves didn't count as men and jacob's opposition to racial hierarchy was something that western philosophers took decades to catch up to which is not even to mention the ones who are still yet to arrive to think that these societies could achieve all this but not invent the wheel was a little strange to me so i decided to try and find out where it came from and maybe this isn't something to be especially proud of but i just had a hunch that it came from nick fuentes and it turns out i was right people want to get technical well according to this study you don't need to look at a study look at the world look outside your [ __ ] house for 10 seconds right every majority african country in the world is poor and all these east asian countries are thriving you know japan had nuclear bombs dropped on and it's more well-off than haiti and mexico and brazil and argentina and chile and everything else right that that's what woke me up you know even when i was like a free market guy i remember watching milton friedman and milton friedman said he was talking about the benefits of colonialism he said in some parts of africa when we arrived there they hadn't discovered the wheel again and uh you know over time i just kind of put two and two together and i was like wait a minute at first i was like well you could forgive white people for being racist back in the day because could you imagine coming into africa in the 19th century and uh you show up to some place and they don't have to really that's like the first thing on the technology tree is the wheel so the gist here is that some curious colonists ventured into africa and found a bunch of tribesmen with their trousers too low blasting rap music and low riders with no wheels they couldn't explain how these people were so uncivilized and so they came up with modern race theory but in all seriousness this claim about the wheel was new to me so i decided to investigate yeah what am i doing with my life it looks like he got the claim from milton friedman the neo-liberal economist who influenced the free market policies of margaret thatcher and ronald reagan and also the military dictatorship in chile here's how friedman puts it in the first place it's not true that the wealth or the benefits of the west derive from exploiting the colony the facts are against you the reason why you say that is because it is so hard for people to get out of the notion that life is a zero-sum game they think if one man benefits another must lose but in a free market both people can benefit now if you take the case of africans the wheel the wheel had not been invented in parts of africa by the end of the 19th century first of all just uh by the by you might notice where friedman is here you know that whole aesthetic of a conservative validating their bad ideas by talking predominantly with students and talk show hosts that's nothing new anyway let's hear that again now if you take the case of africa the wheel the wheel had not been invented in parts of africa by the end of the 19th century so when he says the wheel hadn't been invented in some parts of africa which parts is he talking about the rainforest the mountains places where there would be no use for wheels even if they were invented that was my initial thought at least but i decided to have a look to see where this came from and i'm pretty sure i know what he's done here for example when i looked at some historical sources like this paper on wheel technology in west africa the subject matter is not ignorance of the wheel but that they knew about wheels and chose not to use them interestingly this was also the case in ancient mexico where wheels were used but only on toys unfortunately the answers to this are a bit obscure because most of the maui kingdom including libraries and artifacts were destroyed by the colonists however this piece does offer a few suggestions the first one is animals the wheel was known in sub-saharan africa all the way from mali to somalia but was mostly abandoned in the first millennium a.d this was when war chariots were replaced by individual horse riders and oxtron carts were replaced by pack animals there is a book there is a book called camels and the wheel which talks about the way that camels superseded wheeled transport after the invention of the camel saddle between 500 and 100 bc with the saddle people were able to efficiently move goods across the desert without the risk of running into enemy factions or wild animals the wheel was almost completely abandoned in the middle east where it was invented and even in part by the roman empire so the abandonment of the wheel was beneficial to these societies it wasn't until hundreds of years later with the invention of modern machinery and the declining population of camels when the absence of the wheel would put these societies at a disadvantage and i don't suppose anyone would fault them for not predicting that the second explanation is terrain i've already mentioned the desert and the rainforest but i should also emphasize that when the colonists arrived in sub-saharan africa they shied away from wheels transport too there are records of a gold trader who came under fire when the british governor discovered that he was rolling gold in barrels down to the local town when the governor told him to use wheeled carts instead he refused arguing that they were too expensive and that it would take eight men to a cart allowing for the carts going into ditches or in wet weather sinking in ruts therefore we certainly should not use carts similar stories of people struggling to negotiate the terrain with wheeled transport were far from uncommon and it took decades before the authorities decided to rebuild the roads a decision which was constantly delayed by british governors because they believed it wasn't worth the cost in the end they only committed to expanding the roads to cater for the wheeled vehicles that were brought over from europe a decision which they themselves said was initially pointless because in their own words even if good roads were built there would be no vehicles to travel on them this is why the natives were not using the wheel if the roads didn't need to be fit for wheeled vehicles there was no need to build wheeled vehicles and because there were no wheeled vehicles there was no need to improve the roads as for the natives there is really no evidence that they were averse to technological improvement when the african rulers were introduced to gunpowder they were no less receptive than the europeans were when they learned about it from asia the pre-colonial kings in west africa actually oversaw several road building projects in the 18th and 19th century these roads were more than ideal for pack animals and human porters but not for wheeled vehicles which the people had no need for and the problem is even if the original claim about the wheel was true this isn't really proof of anything wheels weren't invented until 3500 bc over 6 000 years after the dawn of agriculture when it was invented in mesopotamia it was rarely used because the sledges they already had were more effective it wasn't until 300 years later when wheels were adopted for war chariots in ancient egypt but either way this is not the argument they did have the wheel it just didn't afford them the same benefits as those enjoyed by asians and europeans my own personal suggestion would be african empires didn't need to use wheeled transport because they didn't really have anywhere to go most of them were surrounded by desert the sea the rainforest the pridelands the people of zimbabwe had trade routes across the sea with asia and the middle east where they probably saw wheels but it's unlikely they had any incentive to take them home this is because they were effectively living in a safe haven to the south west was the kalahari desert and the rest of the surrounding land was populated by tsitsi flies which were known carriers of sleeping sickness when the mali emperors traveled to mecca their reasons were purely religious not economic the issue here isn't that open-minded colonists arrived in africa and adapted their world view based on what they saw it's that they adapted what they saw in order to fit their world view when the great city of zimbabwe was discovered by colonists it had already been abandoned to this day we still don't know what some of the structures were used for the colonists were so amazed by the city that they refused to believe black africans could have built it they circulated strange theories about how it was actually built by portuguese arab chinese or persian travelers some naturally believed it was built by demons it was only accepted as an african achievement in 1929 when archaeologists and historians confirmed it beyond any doubt even then some settlers held to their own anyway until 1979 ian smith the prime minister of southern rhodesia was publishing educational books with pictures of black people bowing down to the white foreigners who built the city we may never know if wheels existed here when the british journalist richard nicklin hall was appointed as a curator to preserve the city he destroyed most of the ruins and artifacts that were there in his own words he said he was removing the filth and decadence of african occupation i think the phrase here is never underestimate the power of denial in that clip i showed earlier there is a bit where fuentes claims that sub-saharan africa had no agriculture well then you just read more of the you know more about that continent no two-story buildings no written language no wheel like no no basic technology none of the most basic stuff that we take for granted no agriculture no agriculture it's like okay see there you go imagine making that mistake [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music]

Channel: LonerBox

Views: 231,189

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Id: ry2cRP73h9s

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020