It would be a great loss if your columnist, Prof Adekeye Adebajo, were to be silenced as a result of the unreasonable complaints of subscribers such as David Wolpert threatening to cancel their subscriptions (“Adebajo’s racism unacceptable”, September 24).
Adebajo’s articles are highly instructive, even if his detractors feel that his interpretation of history is, at times, somewhat exotic and surrealist.
There is much that we inveterate colonialists need to learn from the learned professor. For example, he tells us something that not many of us knew, that in earlier times there was, in Africa, a thriving agricultural sector that was destroyed by the slave trade.
Now I start to understand why former president Thabo Mbeki talked about the “African renaissance”. He probably had in mind bringing back to life the thriving agricultural sector of bygone days, or perhaps resuscitating the mighty empire of Dahomey, with its fabulous imperial palace and the avenue leading to it, paved with human skulls.
The kingdom gave to the world the progressive and advanced animist rites of voodoo, which were successfully exported and still subsist in the cultures of the West Indies and in the Republic of Haiti. I wish to encourage the professor to continue to instruct us on African history, of which most of us have much to learn.
Eduardo Gutierrez-Garcia
Honorary Consul of Spain
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