Two: Red Thursday

__________________

Red Thursday had been hard for everyone, everywhere. Ivory towers no longer protected anyone from the harsh realities of limited resources, greed, pollution, of evil in the world. The towers had fallen, but everywhere they fell they crushed those living beneath them. It was no different in Africa, and as the Western powers fell, one by one, they left complete autonomy to many who had never been given that privilege, since it had been forcibly taken from ancestors long dead.

The peoples who populated the regions around the Congo River had long understood the harsh realities of the world. They had been enslaved, decimated, butchered, raped, and mutilated by their white oppressors from the North, and all of it in the name of their supposed enrichment. Projects like the Congo Free State, set up by King Leopold the Second of Belgium, are always masked as humanitarian projects. Bringing the ‘light’ of white civilization to the ‘heathen’ blacks, the political smoke screen succeeded in allowing his armies and slave drivers to ravage the forests and enslave the peoples who had inhabited the region for millennia, working them literally to death on massive rubber plantations. Before the “Free State” came to an end, half of the population was dead.

Some things can be forgotten.

Some things can not.

Even though everyone who could even remember that period was long dead, it was still there. The history books may have been burned, the stories may have been murdered and stricken from the record, but it was still there. A kernel of it lived in every descendent of the once proud Upemba race, a people that had once been strong and wealthy. That is, until the Europeans arrived and took it all away from them.

History can be rewritten, but it will still have happened.

Nothing can change that.

Man may have forgotten, but God never forgets.