Is Africa Really Free?

Essay by letsroll_10University, Bachelor'sA-, November 2006

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By the end of the 20th century all the countries within Africa had gain their independent, ending centuries of European colonization. Africa, with optimism for the future, was now a free continent. Yet in relation to Africa, free is a very subjective term. Yes it was free politically, but was it free from ignorant perspectives and opinion, free from denigration and stereotypes from the rest of the world. Africa is not even able to lay claim to its own history and how can a continent be free if its own history is denied.

Through two videos; "Different But Equal"-Basil Davidson and "Africa: A History Denied"- David Dugan, the distortion is made clear, thus in the process presenting the accurate history. "Different But Equal" describes how the some of the world's greatest early civilizations had their origins in the heart of black Africa and discusses some of their artistic, technical and scientific achievements.

"Africa: A History Denied" explores the African kingdom of Great Zimbabwe and Africa's Beautiful Swahili Coast and how European "experts" supposedly discovered the region with beautiful structures, which they refuse could have been built by primitive Africans and claim was built by their white European descendants.

While both films were similar in their overall point, being Africa's historical presence being undermined, they each respectively presented their overall point with unfamiliar argument. These arguments were crucial to the videos success and help to convey the point. "Different But Equal" had the most powerful and meaningful argument and was summed up in its title, "Different But Equal". This is a notion comparing one of the worlds excepted greatest civilization, the Greeks, to Africa and its early civilization. Although the true significance of this argument is not the comparison, but the source of the comparison, and that was from one of...