History Memes

@PugJesus@piefed.social @hansolo@lemmy.today

I get y'all are beefing hard here, but this has been one of the most fascinating threads I've read in a while. While I'm sure neither of you are happy at the exchange, I am very happy about it and thank you for giving me more info about a place I've spent 0% of my life thinking about.

You might need to hear that I don’t have any issue with Sankara, or you. I have issues with the meme you shared being essentially fantasy.

Except every one of the points you disputed has been proven to be correct, you simply don't like that they're being portrayed positively, because it apparently contradicts some universal narrative you've constructed for yourself.

Did you even read that article you linked to? Because I have, many times since it was published in 2016. It only supports me,

Fuck's sake, I see your reading comprehension is as poor as your math.

Reij, Garrity and other scientists working on the ground knew what Wade and other political leaders did not: that farmers in Niger and Burkina Faso, in particular, had discovered a cheap, effective way to regreen the Sahel. They did so by using simple water harvesting techniques and protecting trees that emerged naturally on their farms.

Reij, now based in Amsterdam, began working in the Sahel when the soil literally was blowing away during dust storms. After years away, Reij returned to Niger and Burkina Faso in the summer of 2004. He was stunned by what he saw, green where there had been nothing but tan, denuded land. He quickly secured funding for the first of several studies looking at farming in villages throughout Burkina Faso and Niger.

Innovative farmers in Burkina Faso had adapted years earlier by necessity. They built zai, a grid of deep planting pits across rock-hard plots of land that enhanced water infiltration and retention during dry periods. They built stone barriers around fields to contain runoff and increase infiltration from rain.

Over two years traveling through Burkina Faso and Niger, they uncovered a remarkable metamorphosis. Hundreds of thousands of farmers had embraced ingenious modifications of traditional agriculture practices, transforming large swaths into productive land, improving food and fuel production for about 3 million people.

Tangem concedes that projects in countries like Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Mali are much more advanced than others. Cameroon and Ghana, he adds in an interview from his office in Addis Ababa, began work just this year.

"But looking at what has been achieved in the last 20 years in the Sahel, the large-scale restoration in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali,” he adds, “I am more optimistic now than when I started working in the Sahel in 1978."

I'm sorry that your reading comprehension is apparently below the level of basic literacy. I hope you get better.

and makes zero mention of Sanakara.

"It doesn't mention Sankara, who was instrumental in Burkina Faso's green initiatives started in the 1980s, which is exactly the period of transformation - through the crisis in the late 70s to a rapid improvement in regreening and retention of trees seen in a handful of countries, Burkina Faso notably included, in the 90s and 2000s; therefore, this doesn't relate to Sankara's initiative in the 1980s at all."

Yes. Of course. Silly me. You didn't see those trees in Burkina Faso, so obviously this article is lying, too. Otherwise you might have to walk back a dumbass claim you made, refuted by an article that you claim to have 'repeatedly read' since 2016.

Next, you don’t even know what the meme says.

I literally do, because I possess basic literacy; a skill which is apparently less common online than expected.

From

From a source I didn't use or cite, how lovely.

That’s the 60%. It’s all over the internet.

Oh, well, if it's all over the internet, it must be the only possible interpretation. Reduced to a boolean.

Or, or-and this may be shocking- that's a misreading of the actual statistics, which is an increase of Burkina Faso's literacy rate from 8% to 13% or 13% to 22% (depending on whether you prefer the numbers of the World Bank or Burkina Faso itself) - in both cases, an increase of ~60%.

That’s someone else doing Sankara dirty, not you.

"Doing Sankara dirty" being... highlighting his achievements, which you then universally dismiss because "Nothing lasts in the Sahel" and "African Marxists have never accomplished anything"?

There’s no reason to double down without doing due diligence,

How ironic.

I notice you haven't elaborated on any of your fucking insane points that I disputed about how neither the ability to utilize the written word in French nor local languages is 'real' literacy, by some bizarre mental gymnastics of your's.