Analyze/Professor Tchotsoua Michel (1964-2024), geographer, specialist in development strategies and geomatics, used to tell his students to "not getting angry at the white man as a human being, but rather as a system" because human beings in general always have needs which vary from one person to another, and which are even more considerable at the level of the great civil servants of the State who have the duty, if not to say the obligation, to find ways to satisfy very demanding populations. What must rather be denounced and condemned are the hazardous means used to obtain a certain number of satisfactions acquired very often and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, with disregard for the dignity of the human being.
Between the 16th and the beginning of the 19th century, navigators and other foreign explorers travelled the African coasts, driven by a desire not only to discover new territories, but above all to identify the assets or economic potential of these territories and appropriate them through maps, construction of road infrastructures, and creation of plantations among other things with the aim of further enriching the greatest powers whose nationals or emissaries had always the approval of their leaders to embark on this conquest of the world which continues even today by using all possible sulphurous means. This is the reason why even evangelization campaigns largely contributed to better establishing external hegemony, and maintaining black slave trade in particular which was satisfactory for local leaders, and great powers even more which enjoyed privilege of cheap labour for their plantations and firms located particularly in America and Europe. Indeed, if labour obviously has a cost if it is nationals of this great power who work, why do without cheap labour which is found on a continent populated by sub-humans we can obtain in exchange junk of less value for us, but especially not for those we considered to be an inferior race.
African human capital was vandalized to satisfy superior individuals who were not yet aware of the fact that these blacks were Mens like them, and that racism and other reductionist and segregationist doctrines were bad. We had to wait for the proclamation of the abolition of this trade to witness not the end, but the beginning of an end which still had a long way to go because even the years which followed this abolition were still part from a context where black people had few rights, and enormous duties towards masters who had bought several Africans like cattle, with the complicity of local leaders who cared more about themselves than the lives of their fellow men, and even less the development of their territory; something that European and American civilizations in particular were already aware of.
