Christian, ‘Old School’ Nurse but Modern Manager. Quality Care is my passion! Bradford City, Good Company, Photography & Golf matter too! All opinions my own
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Malcolm Carr retweeted
African Tippu Tip owned roughly 10,000 slaves in the 1890s. That was decades after the American Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment.
While white European societies had already abolished the slave trade and then slavery itself this man was still marching deep into Central Africa, burning villages, chaining captives, and selling them.
Tippu Tip became a famous slave and ivory trader of the East African interior. He led armed caravans of thousands of men hundreds of miles inland, raiding villages at dawn, killing the weak or elderly on the spot, and marching the rest in coffles to the coast. Roughly one-third of the captives often died on the journey.
The survivors were sold for Zanzibar’s clove plantations, for domestic service, and for export to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf. Women and girls were routinely taken as sex slaves and concubines—standard practice in the Arab trade for centuries.
By 1895 he controlled seven plantations worked by about 10,000 slaves. He built a personal commercial and political domain in the eastern Congo, confirmed or replaced local chiefs, monopolized the ivory trade, and became one of the richest men of his era.
He assisted European explorers when it suited him, then watched from comfortable retirement in Zanzibar as European powers finished suppressing the trade he had helped expand. He died in 1905.
This photograph of him seated in turban and robes, staff in hand, is the classic image of the merchant who got rich selling other Africans.
You can earn a degree in African American studies and never hear Tippu Tip’s name, or the names of the African kings and Arab traders who actually captured and sold Africans who crossed the Atlantic or the Indian. Today’s universities treat the Arab and Swahili caravan Slave traders as footnotes or ignored entirely.
This is not an accident. Acknowledging that African elites and Middle Eastern buyers ran the supply side for centuries undercuts the simple narrative that frames slavery as a uniquely white-European or American invention.
British whites abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1833, then spent decades and enormous resources on naval patrols to stop the trade. The United States followed in 1865. These white societies were among the first large-scale institutional and systematic bans on slavery in history.
Slavery and the open slave trade continued in Africa and the Islamic world long afterward. Legal chattel slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia only in 1962; Mauritania was the last country to ban it on paper, in 1981. Tippu Tip’s operation in the 1880s and 1890s was not a dying remnant; it was still large, profitable, and expanding under Arab-Swahili leadership.
The peak slave population in the United States in 1860 was about 3.95 million. Modern estimates of people in forced labor, forced marriage, and other forms of modern slavery put the global total near 50 million TODAY!!!.
Africa alone accounts for millions of slaves TODAY; the Arab states also show some of the highest prevalence rates in the world TODAY. Absolute numbers of people in modern slavery in Africa and the Middle East today exceed the peak historical figure for the United States. Definitions differ—historical chattel slavery is not identical to every form of forced marriage or debt bondage—but the scale of ongoing exploitation is not small.
Tippu Tip was certainly not the only African slave trader. Arab and Swahili traders from Zanzibar and the Omani sphere ran the East African trade for generations, selling captives north into the Middle East for labor, military service.
European societies were among the first to abolish slavery and enforce the ban. That fact is routinely omitted from the version of history taught in American universities. The men who owned ten thousand slaves in the 1890s while marching deep into the African interior should not be ignored. -RJ
Malcolm Carr retweeted
为什么非洲一直没发展起来？我来讲一个实例：非洲第一大国，尼日利亚，人口2.5亿。面积92万平方公里，面积约等于三个华北平原，水土丰茂，一年三熟，降雨量丰沛，全境几乎都是平原和低矮丘陵。介于丛林和荒漠之间，最北的荒漠带边缘，降雨量也和山东相当。
很多人都觉得非洲穷，是因为土地贫瘠、资源匮乏、老天不赏饭吃。但事实恰恰相反，非洲遍地是宝藏，只是很多国家硬生生把一手绝世好牌，打得稀烂。
今天咱们就拿非洲人口第一大国尼日利亚举例，看完它的真实境遇，你就能彻底读懂非洲百年发展困局的核心症结。
毫不夸张地说，尼日利亚的先天条件，放在全球发展中国家里都是天花板级别的存在，完全是老天爷追着喂饭。
这个国家坐拥92万平方公里国土，全境以平缓平原和低矮丘陵为主，没有高山阻隔、没有恶劣戈壁，地形条件远超很多多山国家。
气候更是得天独厚，全境雨水充沛，即便是国土最北端的边缘区域，年降雨量也能持平我国山东。
最让人羡慕的是，这里全年高温无霜，土地肥力出众，一年可以稳定种植三季庄稼，发展农业的自然优势得天独厚。
除了土地和气候，尼日利亚还有最核心的人口红利。全国总人口超2.5亿，劳动力数量庞大、人口结构年轻，完全不缺干活的人力。
靠着这份顶级天赋，早年间的尼日利亚妥妥的农业强国，花生、可可、棕榈油等农产品远销全球，是当时全球知名的农产品出口国，农业基础打得格外扎实。
有地、有人、有气候、有产业底子，按理说这样的国家，就算发展不到发达国家水平，也绝对能让百姓安居乐业、衣食无忧。
可现实狠狠打脸：如今的尼日利亚，早已褪去往日荣光，彻底沦为贫穷、动荡、落后的代名词。
数据不会骗人，目前尼日利亚有超过1.39亿人口深陷贫困线以下。
离谱的是，守着一年三熟的肥沃良田，这个国家居然无法实现粮食自给，每年都要花巨额外汇进口粮食、衣物、日用品等基础物资，无数普通民众连温饱问题都难以解决。
好好的王牌国家，为何会沦落到这般境地？所有悲剧的开端，都源于半个多世纪前的一场“暴富骗局”。
上世纪50年代，尼日利亚境内勘探出大量优质原油，丰富的石油资源让这个国家瞬间看到了“躺赚”的捷径。
在此之前，国家财政、百姓收入全都靠农业支撑；石油被发掘后，海量原油源源不断卖出，巨额外汇轻松入账。
赚钱变得太过简单，让从上到下彻底丢掉了踏实发展的心思。政府直接放弃深耕农业、布局制造业，把国家所有经济命脉，全部押注在石油单一产业上。
全国的资源、政策、人力全部向石油产业倾斜，大片肥沃良田无人耕种、逐渐荒废。普通农民也看清了现实：种地辛苦一年赚的钱，远不如去城市从事石油相关零工赚得多。
于是千万农民放下锄头、涌入城市，传统农业体系彻底崩塌。短短数十年，尼日利亚从享誉全球的粮食出口大国，彻底变成了依赖进口的缺粮国。
产业单一畸形，只是尼日利亚衰败的第一步，治理混乱和分配不公，才是压垮国家的核心利刃。石油产业创造的财富是天文数字，但这些巨额收益，从来没有惠及普通民众。
绝大部分石油财富被少数权贵阶层垄断瓜分，普通人别说分红，连基本的就业、福利保障都得不到。
更讽刺的是，作为石油核心产区的尼日尔三角洲，不仅没靠石油致富，反而常年遭受原油开采带来的污染，土地盐碱化、水源被污染、庄稼无法生长，当地百姓世代承受着环境破坏的恶果，苦不堪言。
巨大的贫富差距、资源分配不公，持续激化社会矛盾，各类武装冲突、地方暴乱此起彼伏。
局势一旦动荡，工厂停工、农田荒废、外资撤离，没人敢来投资兴业，经济发展彻底陷入“越乱越穷、越穷越乱”的死循环。
而制度的严重短板，直接彻底封死了尼日利亚的翻身之路。
当地土地产权极其混乱，全国仅有极少数农民拥有合法土地证，想要发展规模化农业、引进企业落地投产，都会被产权问题卡住，农业现代化根本无从谈起。
同时当地行政体系臃肿低效、办事流程繁琐，腐败问题根深蒂固，营商环境极差。
最基础的民生保障更是缺失，全国电力供应极不稳定，日均供电仅有三四个小时，绝大多数工厂无法正常生产。没有工业支撑，日用品、工业品全部依赖进口，国家彻底丧失自主生产能力。
尼日利亚的教训给所有国家敲响了警钟：自然资源从来不是发展的终极底牌，稳定的制度、长远的眼光、踏实奋斗的心态，才是一个国家行稳致远的根本。
空有绝世好牌，却没有驾驭的能力，最终只会白白浪费天赋，困在贫困落后的泥潭里无法自拔。
Malcolm Carr retweeted
On 12 September 2018 Stephen Darby’s life split into two distinct halves.
Before that date he was a 29-year-old professional footballer, a reliable right-back who had captained Bradford City through their most famous cup run, and a man who had just married the love of his life, England women’s captain Steph Houghton. After that date he was a man facing a brutal, incurable disease.
He had noticed the weakness first in his right arm and hand. He knew he wasn’t as strong. It took 21 months of tests, scans and agonising uncertainty before the doctors finally confirmed the devastating truth: Motor Neurone Disease. MND is a degenerative condition that affects how nerves in the brain and spinal cord function. There is currently no cure. Life expectancy is normally two to five years. A third of people die within a year.
Stephen Darby had just three months of marriage behind him when he heard those words. “I would like to ask for privacy at this time so I can adjust to the battle I have ahead and that I can spend time with those closest to me,” he said, with a dignity that would come to define his fight.
He retired immediately. The career that began in the Liverpool academy, that took him to a Champions League debut against Atlético Madrid in 2008, that saw him make over 200 appearances for Bradford City and captain them to a League Cup final, was over.
But Stephen Darby did not disappear. He refused to let MND define the rest of his story. Alongside his close friend and British Forces veteran Chris Rimmer, who was also living with the disease, he launched the Darby Rimmer MND Foundation.
Their mission was simple: to raise funds for research, to support families, and to find a cure. He could have retreated. He could have spent his remaining years in quiet privacy. But he chose to fight out loud.
He spoke about the reality of his condition with unflinching honesty. “It is a brutal disease with a horrible prognosis,” he said. But he also spoke about gratitude, about not wasting time, about finding joy in the small things. He told his family to “enjoy what we have now.” He refused to let the ticking clock steal the present.
In March 2024 he completed a 178-mile charity march from Anfield to Valley Parade, alongside fellow MND sufferer and former Premier League striker Marcus Stewart. The football community rallied around him. Former teammates, rival fans and clubs from across the country stood with him. He has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds. He has funded research. He has given hope to families who felt utterly alone.
And through it all, Steph has been by his side. She has spoken about the pain of watching the man she loves lose the simple things we take for granted: the ability to walk, to eat, to climb the stairs. She has admitted that not every day is good. But she has also said, “I love him to absolute bits. I know he’s as strong as ever. He’s willing to fight this for as long as possible.”
Stephen Darby was a footballer. He was a captain. He was a leader. But his greatest leadership came after the final whistle of his career. He became a symbol of hope. A symbol of defiance. A symbol of a man who, faced with the cruellest possible diagnosis, chose to stand up and fight for everyone else who would follow him. He wanted his legacy to be “to carry on the fight” and to “leave MND in a better place.”
He is doing exactly that. That is the real story of Stephen Darby. Not the trophies. The courage to fight for a future he might not see, so that others might have one.
Malcolm Carr retweeted
🌺 A pre-match Remembrance service will take place at the Mbanq Valley Parade ahead of Saturday’s @EmiratesFACup tie with @officialbantams.
Supporters travelling to Yorkshire are asked to take their seats in plenty of time before kick-off for the standard bearers, The Last Post, and a minute’s silence.
Full details ⤵️
marinefc.com/pre-match-remem…
#WeAreMarine | 📷 Officialbantams
Malcolm Carr retweeted
Part of Nigel Biggar’s article in The Sunday Times today, reminding us that a careful reading of history, by an historian who know what he’s talking about, is a big improvement on what too often passes for debate about slavery reparations.
Malcolm Carr retweeted
Look at that!!
My god the people of Britain have absolutely smashed the poppy displays.
Stunning!!
Malcolm Carr retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Malcolm Carr retweeted
Dawn Butler makes a powerful point about inherited debts being owed by the modern generation. I'd like to thank her for this.
It today's terms freeing the slaves cost around £17Billion (using GDP values) on top of which Royal Navy deployments for the 60 years or so they were active in hunting down the slaves ships and disrupting the slave trade cost the UK another £30Billion to £50Billion at today's value (again using GDP values).
Using the figures above we get a sum of between £47Billion and £67Billion that Black Britains and Black people from the former Empire owe the UK Treasury. And this is before any calculation is considered for the compensation to the families of the 17,000 sailors who died on these operations.
Having explained so cogently why this sum should be paid I look forward to @DawnButlerBrent's suggestions as to a payment plan.
Malcolm Carr retweeted
A Statement of Conscience on October 7
I will not start by saying ‘as a Muslim’ or ‘as an imam’, but as a human being.
On October 7, over 1,200 innocent people were killed in a single day. Families were shot in their homes. Young people out dancing were hunted across open fields. Over 250 people, including children and the elderly, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. I think of a mother hiding in a safe room with her baby’s mouth covered. I think of a father listening as the line went quiet. I think of families who waited month after month for someone to come home, only to receive a coffin. I didn’t need my faith to recognize the evil of what happened. My heart told me first.
But I’m a Muslim and an imam, and I owe the world one honest sentence: what was done that day was a crime against God. God teaches that whoever kills one innocent soul, it is as if he had killed all humanity.
This day has an author: Yahya Sinwar. He planned it, ordered it, and knew what would follow. Every death of that day and war he started rests on him and Hamas leaders who sat in tunnels and foreign hotels and called slaughter a victory. It rests on every Palestinian leader who cheered, excused, handed out sweets, or said nothing. They chose this. They own it.
But Sinwar did not invent himself. He was the fruit of a tree planted almost a century ago by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas named itself in its founding charter as the Brotherhood’s branch in Palestine. The Brotherhood’s poison is slow. It arrives through study circles, youth camps, charity boxes, and kind words to lonely young men. Drop by drop, it teaches him that his religion is a political party, his neighbour is his enemy, the Jew is the cause of his sorrow, and God is pleased by rage. By the time the gun arrives, the soul is already taken.
I have seen this poison in mosques where sermons became rallies and young men could recite slogans but not sit still for a verse on mercy. Every people that let the Brotherhood in has paid in blood and ruined generations. It has never built anything it did not first set on fire.
Behind Hamas stands another hand: the IRGC. It was the IRGC’s money, weapons, and training that turned a hateful idea into an army. One calls itself Sunni and the other Shia, and they may curse each other’s creeds, but they are united in what they worship. It is not God. It is power. The same IRGC that armed the killers of October 7 shoots Iranian girls for showing their hair, hangs young men for asking to be free, and has left graves from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut. They speak in God’s name. So did Pharaoh speak in the name of heaven.
So let me say this clearly. Hamas and the IRGC are not merely enemies of Islam. That would be too small a charge, as if their crime were only against us. They are enemies of God. God is the Giver of life, yet they deal in death. God calls Himself the Most Merciful, yet they have made cruelty a sacrament. God honoured the children of Adam, yet they look at a child and see a target or a shield. To murder what God created and sign His name to it is the oldest blasphemy.
And we Muslims have been too quiet. Some of us were afraid. Some told ourselves it was not our business. Some, God forgive them, felt something other than horror that morning and never confessed it. Silence was the soil this poison grew in. I will not add to it.
So on this anniversary, let us say plainly what our scripture already says. The Jews are not our enemies. They are our cousins in Abraham, and their dead were created by the same God who created us. Today belongs to them: the murdered, the hostages, and families who still set a place at the table. To them I say: I am sorry for what was done to you by men who used the words of my prayers. You’re not alone in your grief or remembrance.
The enemies of God are those who murder in His name. We know their names. It is time we said them from our own pulpits, in our own voices, before they speak for us again.
Imam Tawhidi
Malcolm Carr retweeted
In 1967 Britain had more electric vehicles on its roads than every other country on earth put together, and they were all delivering milk.
There were tens of thousands of them. The milk float: open sided, battery under the floor, top speed of about 15 miles an hour, and a whine you could pick out in your sleep. It was charged overnight at the depot and was back there by lunchtime.
It carried glass bottles. Each one was collected from your step the next morning, washed and refilled. A bottle went round like that 20 or 30 times before it broke. The foil cap went for scrap. There was no other packaging.
The milk had come from farms within a few miles, through a local dairy, and was on the step before 7.
So here is what the country had. A zero-emission delivery fleet. Reusable containers with a return rate any modern scheme would kill for. No plastic. A supply chain you could cycle the length of. A man who noticed if an old lady's bottles were piling up, and knocked.
It was dismantled in about 15 years, because a supermarket could sell milk a few pence cheaper in a plastic jug as a way of getting you through the door.
Every piece of that system is now the subject of a government target for 2040.
It was running in 1967, silently, in the dark, and nobody thought it was worth a mention.
Malcolm Carr retweeted
Haha imagine the irony if we went down with GA and Bradford went up with PH 🤮😂
Malcolm Carr retweeted
It’s been more than a day since it was confirmed that at least 100,000 Iranian civilians, half of them children, were murdered by the Islamic regime during the January protests.
Ms. Rachel, Macklemore, and pro-Palestinian activists haven’t said a single word.
Malcolm Carr retweeted
Every time someone says "1948," we only get half the story. So here's the whole thing.
In November 1947, the UN voted to divide the land into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The UN didn't give the Jews a country. It recognized a people with 3,000 years of roots in the land, who had been promised a home since 1917.
The Jews got a small, fragmented territory, and Jerusalem wasn't even part of it. They said yes anyway. The Arab leaders said no. The day after the vote, Jewish buses were attacked, and the country slid into war.
And to those who say Israel stole a country.
There was no Palestinian state to steal from. The land had been ruled by the Ottomans for 400 years and then by the British. Israel got its share through the UN. The rest came from a war the other side started.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, five Arab armies invaded from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The goal wasn't a Palestinian state. The goal was that there would be no Jewish state.
Israel had no real army and barely any weapons, and many of its soldiers were Holocaust survivors who had come ashore only months earlier. They won because the alternative was to die.
Yes, around 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes in that war. Some were expelled by Israeli forces. That's documented, and it shouldn't be denied. Others fled the fighting, and some were told by their own leaders to leave their villages until the Arab armies had won. They didn't.
But there was another expulsion nobody talks about.
Around 850,000 Jews were driven out or pushed out of Arab countries like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco. Families who had lived there for centuries lost everything. The Jews of Jerusalem's Old City were expelled by Jordan.
Israel took them in and gave them new lives.
The Arab countries did the opposite with the Palestinians.
They kept them in camps and in refugee status that is now passed down to the fourth generation, so today there are nearly six million registered refugees.
In Lebanon, they're still barred from a long list of professions. And from 1948 to 1967, Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza. Neither of them created a Palestinian state. They could have done it at any time.
Israel took in refugees, drained swamps, and built a beautiful country with no oil and enemies on every border.
The Palestinian leaders were offered the same chance, and they chose war instead. Imagine what could have been built if they had said yes.
The roughly 160,000 Arabs who stayed in Israel became Israeli citizens. Today they number around two million, with the right to vote, their own parties, and seats in parliament.
So when someone says Israel was built on expulsion, remember the whole picture. The Palestinians were offered a state before Israel even existed. The Arab side chose war. Israel defended itself.
Israel didn't start that war. It just refused to lose it.
Am Israel Chai.❤️🔥
