The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
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When one sees a newspaper headline which announces that, ‘Scientists stunned by ‘extraordinary’ ancient wooden structure discovery’ it is perhaps reasonable to expect something a little more dramatic than the finding of sticks in Africa.
We are so obsessed with the slavery which existed centuries ago and about which we can do nothing at all, that we sometimes forget that chattel slavery exists right now in Africa
From 2020-2023 hospital admissions linked to kush rose by 4000 per cent
Sierra Leone has declared a national emergency over a psychoactive drug made from human bones.
The country has witnessed a sharp spike in abuse of the drug, kush, forcing police officers to guard cemeteries in the capital of Freetown, to stop young men from digging up skeletons to get high.
Kush is a drug made from a variety of substances, including toxic chemicals, herbs, cannabis, disinfenctant but one of its main ingredients is ground-up human bone, as they contain traces of sulphur, which allegedly can enhance the drugs effect.
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Posted in Africa, Drugs and Cartels
For centuries, there was a flourishing business of castrating young men and boys in Europe and then selling them as slaves to the Muslim world.
Mention of eunuchs summons up for most of us images of those guarding the harems of Arab potentates. We are also aware that slaves on plantations in ante bellum America were on occasion castrated for some transgression or other. Whatever other horrors the Atlantic slave trade entailed though, routine castration was never one of them. It is true that black slaves in America and the Caribbean were, from time to time, castrated, but this was never a common occurrence and was usually inflicted due to exceptional circumstances, such as an accusation of rape. With the act of castration so likely to result in death, it would have made no sense to hazard the lives of slaves in this way too frequently. In Europe, by contrast, the castration of white slaves was carried out on an industrial scale (Tracy, 2013). In Venice and the French city of Verdun ‘castration houses’ were set up to produce eunuchs for export to Egypt and other Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The majority of the young boys were Slavs taken prisoner by the Vikings and then sold on to slavers. The Slavs, from whose name is derived the modern word ‘slave’, are an ethnic group which originated in what is today western Russia. By the sixth or seventh century AD, they had spread south into the Balkans, almost as far as Greece, and west into what is now Poland.
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Posted in Africa, Europe, Hidden History, History, Sex Crimes
The campaigns in Britain to remove statues of people connected with the slave trade is baffling to people in countries such as Nigeria
We will be looking into the early stages of Zionism. How it came to be, with ideas like Spiritual Zionism and people Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber. Then we will look into Theodor Herzl and what he did to make Zionism a possibility.
Posted in Africa, Hidden History, History, Radicals, Religion
In this episode, we travel to the Nile Valley, and tell the story of one of the most iconic cultures ever produced by humankind – the civilizations of ancient Egypt. I want to show how this series of related cultures grew up in the floodplains of their great river, and built some of the most enduring and recognizable structures in the world. And I want to tell the story of what happened to bring the age of the Pharaohs finally and cataclysmically to an end.