In April 2009, a 22-year-old Russian man, Alexei Roskov drank 3 bottles of vodka, became drunk and jumped out of his 5-storey-building kitchen window the first time, and staggered back up.
When his wife, Yekaterina, started "nagging" him to stop, she watched in horror as he jumped out the second time and staggered back up again.
He was about to jump for the third time when paramedics arrived, restrained him, and treated him for minor cuts and bruises he got after the falls.
When the Jews arrived in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar spared no effort to humiliate them. He made them march down the riverbank, bound and naked, while he watched from a royal ship on the water.
Among the exiles, there were Jewish youths whose beauty was so striking. Nebuchadnezzar had them executed and their bodies mutilated and trampled underfoot to prevent the Chaldean women from seeing their beauty and desiring it. A daring attempt by some 80,000 young priests to escape ended in tragedy.
“…Africa will write its own history and, in both North and South, it will be a history of glory and dignity.” —Patrice Lumumba (July 2, 1925 - January 17, 1961).
Patrice Émery Lumumba was a Congolese politician and independence leader who served as the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Republic of the Congo) from June until September 1960. He played a significant role in the transformation of the Congo from a colony of Belgium into an independent republic.
Ideologically an African nationalist and Pan-Africanist, he led the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) party from 1958 until his death.
Shortly after Congolese independence in 1960, a mutiny broke out in the army, marking the beginning of the Congo Crisis. Lumumba appealed to the United States and the United Nations for help to suppress the Belgian-supported Katangan secessionists. Both refused, so Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for support. This led to growing differences with President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Chief-of-Staff Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, as well as with the United States and Belgium.
Lumumba was subsequently imprisoned by state authorities under Mobutu and executed by a firing squad under the command of Katangan authorities. Following his death, he was widely seen as a martyr for the wider Pan-African movement.
This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of Congolese was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals, and hired killers.
In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on June 30, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.
The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba's followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai.
Since Lumumba's physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.
Declassified documents reveal that the CIA had plotted to assassinate Lumumba. These documents indicate that the Congolese leaders who killed Lumumba, including Mobutu Sese Seko and Joseph Kasa-Vubu, received money and weapons directly from the CIA.
This same disclosure showed that, at that time, the U.S. government believed that Lumumba was a communist and feared him because of the Cold War.
In 2013, the U.S. State Department admitted that President David Eisenhower authorised the murder of Lumumba as the inauguration of President-elect John F. Kennedy in January 1961 caused fear among Mobutu's faction and within the CIA that the incoming administration would shift its favour to the imprisoned Lumumba.
While awaiting his presidential inauguration, Kennedy had come to believe that Lumumba should be released from custody, though not be allowed to return to power. However, Lumumba was killed three days before Kennedy's inauguration on January 20, 1961, though Kennedy would not learn of the killing until February 13, 1961.
Northern Nigeria Ancient History: The Nok Culture.
Terra cotta Is a figure in baked/burnt clay, wouldn't you be surprise to learn that based on radio carbon dating Such civilization was there at the Kaduna area some 3000 years back, yes Some 200-500 years before the Christian era; before the birth of Christ. The culture is the extant evidences of human existence in Nigeria and the earliest iron civilization of that kind in West Africa . It is the deepest verifiable of Nigerian history so far.
The Nok Excavation
It was in 1936 when the British colonist were mining tin in the Nok village in Southern Kaduna when they stumbled on a hard backed clay known as terracotta in human and animal figures, stone and Iron tools, the tin mining was wrapped up, and an expert British archaeologist named Bernand Shaw was brought in to excavate it out, surveying around the axis, the finding was named after the present Nok village beneath which the art works were found since no body knows who did it as the makers mysteriously vanished or migrated. One problem of archaeology is that it can't tell the actual people but rather their culture and it's dating can only be approximate not specific . After all archaeology tell the History of extinct people from The mouth piece of their material remains.
The artefacts are mostly in Human and animal figures made with backed clay with holes in their faces, backed clay hair pleating, a figure of a thinking man and a man riding a horse, along with life human size terracotta. They were designed with elaborated jewelry.
The origin of the people is not yet ascertain but, historians and archaeologist believe that since bones, sorghums and corn, a staple food in Northern Nigeria, were also found, it may suggest that the people were indigenous to the region. The Nok artefacts shows the artistic potentialities of Nigerians in the past. Pottery is never new to Nigerians.
The Nok work is the first serious archaeological exercise in modern Nigeria and The date of the iron works proved to be the extant (oldest) in sub Saharan Africa which make archaeologist to conclude that the Nok people are the first people to use iron tools in black Africa.
Other findings are stone works dated to thousands of years back during the Stone Age, this testified that there were actually people in Kaduna area not only before Christ but since before the discovery of Iron during the Stone Age, thousands of years ago. The stone carving are mostly quartz and granites.
Iron works and horse terracotta proves that there might have been relationship between the North Africans and Central Nigerian people since B.C, because Meroe civilization of Sudan started Iron work in Africa and horses are of the Berber and Arab world. Other areas where the Nok terracotta were found were Taruga in Abuja, Samun Dukiya, Kagara in Niger, Katsina Ala, Jos etc.
Who ever might had made the Nok terracotta must have been alive during the transition period between the stone and Iron Ages. The people must had been living before the period that those things were made, because one cannot start making things with sophistication, advancement and sophistication are attained from accumulative experience over years of practice, they also took their time to study the environment because their artworks depict the that, for example an elephant terracotta was found which proves they must had seen an elephant, which was not domestic animals which the archaeologist may conclude they were hunters too or elephants might had invaded their territory, because some body that had never seen an elephant can not make it sculpture.
The region was probably moister and more heavily wooded during this period than it is today, but was still north of the zone of dense forests. The people would have subsisted by farming and cattle raising. As the climate gradually became drier, they would have drifted south, so the Nok people may have been the ancestors of people such as the Igala , Nupe, Yoruba and Ibo, whose artwork shows similarities to the earlier Nok artefacts. Other similar artefacts were found in upper Volta.
Professor Murray Last maintained that the Nok people migrated North ward to establish Kangoma kingdom and later Zazzau. Other archaeological sites in the North include: Birnin Kudu, Kwatarwashi, Kufena and Turunku in Zazzau, the great city walls (Ganuwa, Kusarta in Borno, Rop Rock in Jos, Tse Dura in Benue, etc.
Some of the Nok artefacts were looted away, International Art Research concluded that more than 1000 Nok artefacts are in circulation in the arts black market in Europe, North America and Japan, in 2010 French customs arrested a French citizen that was smuggling the Nok artefacts to France.
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