MAPUTO, Mozambique (PANA) – The West “has eaten our flesh raw and committed historic crimes by engaging in the slave trade and making huge fortunes from it,” Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gadhafi declared here July 12.
Speaking at the end of the African Union (AU) summit in the Mozambiqan capital, the Libyan leader affirmed that the West in the past considered Africa as an unknown continent discovered by the Portuguese and the Dutch, and where lived in the jungles people who could be taken and sold as slaves.
“This is what led to the boats of historic crimes, the boats of slavery,” the Libyan leader said.
Colonel Gadhafi called on the West to deal with Africa as an equal partner, adding that he who wished to do business there must do so with respect for the continent and the huge sacrifices it underwent during the slave trade for centuries.
Reaffirming his objection to western attempts to impose their values, culture and morality on Africa, the Libyan revolutionary leader said that Africa was a continent rich of its own values, culture, morality and religion, which dated back to thousands of years.
These religions, he said, dated back before the Berlin conference of the late 19th century, when the West embarked on Christianization campaigns in Africa during the colonial period.
He insisted on the capacity of Africans to manage their own social, economic and political affairs, and found it “absurd” for the continent to import cultures, values, religions, morality, and even the history of the West.
For the Libyan leader, Africans are capable of dealing with issues, such as good governance, the management of their business, far from the western models and from western democracy.
Col. Gadhafi called for the consolidation of the African Union, its structures and instruments, and the mobilization of the youths and women to that end.
He said he favored the redistribution of the continent’s wealth and water resources and for its industrialization and access to technology, in a bid to answer the West, which disparaged the Black man.
“We are friends to those who mean friendship to us, and enemies to those who assault us,” he concluded.
