A peep through the Windows to Anarchy: From Prague to the Present, How Religion Casts Humanity into the Abyss.

On a May morning in 1618, a group of angry Protestant nobles seized two Catholic governors and their secretary in Prague Castle and hurled them out of a window, some seventy feet above the cobbled courtyard. They survived the fall with Catholics claiming that angels cushioned their descent, while Protestants sneered that a dung heap had done the job. But symbolism mattered more than survival. This act: the Second Defenestration of Prague, did not merely assault three men; it tore Europe apart. Within months, the Bohemian Revolt had escalated into the Thirty Years’ War, a cataclysm that depopulated swathes of Central Europe and left entire generations scarred.

It was not the first such act in Prague. In 1419, radical Hussites had stormed the New Town Hall, dragged councillors to the windows, and pitched them onto the spears of the mob below. That earlier defenestration ignited the Hussite Wars, long before Martin Luther had nailed his theses to the church door. Twice in two centuries, Czechs declared their dissent by throwing authority out the window. Twice, religious faith transformed anger into anarchy.

These episodes are not quaint relics of medieval turbulence; they are mirrors. They reveal a truth as urgent in the 21st century as it was in the 15th, that when religious belief fuses with political power, societies fracture, violence escalates, and the claim to divine truth becomes a licence for bloodshed.

The Anatomy of Religious Wars find its foundation in faith and fire. The Hussite Wars were not about theology alone. They were about power, authority, and the right to define identity. The same is true of the Thirty Years’ War, often simplistically remembered as Catholic versus Protestant. In reality, it was a scramble for supremacy in which princes, mercenaries, and monarchs cloaked ambition in the language of faith.

But faith gave the conflict its ferocity. To kill a heretic was not merely to silence an enemy but to serve God. The religious imagination, once politicised, transformed neighbours into devils. And when the killing was over, when treaties had been signed, Europe was left haunted by reduced populations, wasted fields, and a creeping recognition that perhaps God had been less present in the smoke of battle than men had supposed.

The temptation is to dismiss Prague’s defenestrations as a peculiarity of Central Europe. But the pattern repeats itself wherever religion asserts its monopoly over truth.
• In the Middle East, millennia-old rivalries still masquerade as sacred duty. Sunni and Shia Muslims remain locked in cycles of suspicion and slaughter, their schism rooted in a seventh-century dispute over succession yet fuelled by modern geopolitics. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is drenched in the blood of competing religious claims to land and prophecy.
• In South Asia, the Partition of India in 1947; a simple act, ostensibly about self-determination, became a theatre for Hindu and Muslim violence. Up to a million were slaughtered, entire communities uprooted. Here again, religious identity fused with statehood turned a political problem into a humanitarian abyss.
• In Africa, Sudan’s long wars, and Nigeria’s current struggles with Boko Haram, show how religion still provides not just consolation but justification for chaos. Each sermon declaring God’s will becomes a spark in dry tinder.


From Jerusalem to Jos, Ayodhya to Abuja, the lesson of Prague is tragically alive: when divine truth enters politics, windows to anarchy are flung wide.

What makes religion uniquely dangerous in the public sphere is its absolutism. Unlike ideology, which can be debated, or policy, which can be revised, religious truth claims often brook no compromise. If God has spoken, what space remains for negotiation? To dissent is not merely to disagree, it is deemed to blaspheme.

The only thing absolutism does is turn rulers into zealots and dissenters into heretics. The Catholic Habsburgs of the 17th century could not imagine granting lasting freedom to Protestant nobles without betraying their role as guardians of the true faith. Likewise, the Hussite radicals of 1419 could not tolerate councillors they saw as enemies of God. From this perspective, defenestration was not violence but purification.

Today, the same logic fuels those who bomb, burn, or ban in God’s name. It is not reason but revelation that drives them, not negotiation but salvation that justifies them.

If there is a lesson in the shattered glass and broken bodies below Prague’s windows, it is not simply that religion causes violence. It is that certainty, when claimed as divine, destroys the possibility of peaceful coexistence.

Europe eventually learned this lesson. Out of the ashes of the Thirty Years’ War came the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which for the first time enshrined the principle that different faiths could coexist within the same political order. Out of centuries of religious slaughter arose the slow, hard-won idea of secularism: that the state should govern by reason, not revelation; that belief belongs to the private conscience, not the public sword.

What humanity needs now is not another sacred war but a secular ethic of doubt; the willingness to admit that our grasp of truth is partial, that our convictions may be flawed, that no faith has the right to dominate all others. Doubt is not weakness but wisdom. It is the guardrail against the intoxicating poison of certainty.

In conclusion, the Defenestrations of Prague are more than historical curiosities; they are warnings. They show us what happens when religion and power climb into the same room. The windows open, the bodies fall, and nations are plunged into decades of fire.

We live in an age where religious nationalism is again on the rise, Hindu majoritarianism in India, Islamist insurgencies in Africa, Christian fundamentalism shaping American politics, Jewish and Muslim absolutism feeding conflict in the Holy Land. Each believes itself righteous. Each risks opening a new window to anarchy.

To keep those windows shut, we must resist the siren song of certainty, and embrace the humility of doubt, the universality of reason, and the secular conviction that no single belief should dictate the fate of nations. Only then can we hope to live together without throwing one another, once again, into the abyss.

Dr. EK Gwuru writes form Nkolo Ikembe.

Abraham’s Bloody Legacy and the Tragedy of Palestine
The greatest disservice done to humanity is the reduction of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to religion. For decades, the West, and much of its echo chamber in Africa and Latin America, has cast it as a crude civilisational feud: Christians against Muslims, Jews against Arabs, East against West. This framing has proved convenient for political leaders, theologians and media outlets alike. But it is also profoundly misleading. It masks the real dynamics of a modern settler-colonial project, it erases the lived history of Palestinians, and it makes the search for justice seem almost impossible.

To understand the depth of this tragedy we must look beyond 20th-century geopolitics and reach further back, to the foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At the centre of these traditions stands Abraham, revered as the father of faith. Yet if the myth is stripped of its pious aura, it reads less like a story of faith and more like the first recorded charter of dispossession. Abraham, in delusion, leaves Mesopotamia with a band of armed followers, and his descendants are, supposedly, commanded to wipe out the original inhabitants of Canaan; Jebusites, Hittites, Perizzites, Amorites. Cities are razed, genocide entrenched with populations slaughtered, and survivors enslaved.

Whether one treats these accounts as delusion, history, allegory or myth is almost beside the point. What matters is that they set a precedent. They created a template in which delusion and consequent conquest could be sanctified, displacement normalised, and the erasure of entire peoples (genocide) justified as the will of God. The Canaanites disappeared not only from their land but from the memory of history itself. In their place, a theology of election (being chosen) took root, destined to be retold in new guises across centuries.

The Myth as Manual
What might have remained an unsettling ancient tale became, over time, a manual for conquest.

Judaism retained the promise of return to Zion. Christianity reimagined itself as the “new Israel,” and unleashed Crusades that drenched Jerusalem in blood. Islam invoked divine mandate during its early expansions. Each tradition drew, in some form, from the well of Abraham’s election (being chosen).

But perhaps the most devastating appropriation came with European colonialism. When Puritan settlers arrived in North America, they explicitly likened themselves to Israelites entering the promised land. Native Americans were the Canaanites of the New World: heathen, expendable, destined for removal. Sermons and laws were infused with this language, providing spiritual sanction for extermination and displacement.

In Africa, and anywhere else the black man was found, the pattern repeated itself. Missionaries and administrators cast colonisation as a civilising mission, a divine duty to subdue the “pagan.” The Berlin Conference of 1884, where European powers carved up the continent, may have been driven by economics, but it was cloaked in a moral language that echoed the Abrahamic delusional myth of chosen peoples and promised lands.

Everywhere, the story was the same: the original owners were wiped off, their cultures erased, their presence made inconvenient to destiny. The conquerors recited Abraham’s script, and the world paid the price.

Zionism and the Return of Joshua
In the late 19th century, Zionism emerged as a response to Europe’s violent antisemitism. But its legitimacy was framed in the language of delusion, couched as prophecy: a people returning to the land promised to Abraham. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” was as false as it was revealing. Palestine was not empty; it was full of villages, orchards, markets and families. Yet, like the Canaanites before them, Palestinians were rendered invisible.

The British Empire sanctified this vision through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, turning imperial strategy into biblical fulfilment. Then came 1948 and the Nakba: the destruction of more than 400 villages, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, the creation of a refugee population that endures to this day. The Book of Joshua had been replayed, not with swords and chariots but with rifles, bulldozers and UN resolutions.

The pattern persists. Settlement expansion continues, Gaza is bombarded, and Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) alike are treated as if they were never there. The myth of Abraham’s promise still hovers over policy, turning dispossession into destiny.


Why the West Needs the Myth
Why does the West cling so tightly to this framing? Because it serves its interests.

For American evangelicals, support for Israel is not merely foreign policy; it is theology. Israel’s survival is recast as a precondition for the Second Coming, and Palestinian Christians (among the oldest Christian communities in the world) are written out of the story entirely.

For Europe, guilt plays a decisive role. Centuries of antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust, have left many governments reluctant to criticise Israel’s actions, even when they mirror the very exclusions and erasures that Europe itself inflicted on Jews. To support Israel, uncritically and at any cost, has become a form of penance.

And for Western media and political elites, the “religious war” narrative is simply easier. It transforms a struggle over land, sovereignty and human rights into a clash of identities. It relieves the world of the burden of acknowledging settler-colonialism in real time.

The Colonised Who Echo the Coloniser
If the West’s motives are cynical, the mimicry of the Global South is perhaps even more tragic. Africa and Latin America should be able to recognise Palestine instinctively. Their own histories are full of dispossession: slavery, conquest, cultural erasure. Their ancestors were the Canaanites of empire, swept aside by new Abrahams with muskets and crosses.

Yet today, many of these states uncritically parrot Western framings. Aid dependency buys silence. American evangelical churches export pro-Israel theology into African and Latin American congregations. Leaders seeking Western approval echo the coloniser’s script.

The result is bitter irony: those who once suffered dispossession endorse its repetition. History’s victims have been persuaded to cheer for the conqueror.

The Price of Believing the Myth
The costs of continuing to believe in this myth are immense.
It legitimises genocide, by cloaking violence in sacred duty. It erases indigenous peoples, making them vanish from maps and memory. It divides humanity, pitting Jews, Christians and Muslims against one another as if destined for perpetual conflict. And it distracts from the real motives of power; land, water, resources, strategic control.
This is not scripture as heritage; this is scripture as weapon. And its blade still cuts.

Breaking the Cycle
If there is to be a future beyond endless dispossession, humanity must break free from Abraham’s bloody legacy.
That means reframing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for what it truly is: not a feud between religions but a confrontation between coloniser and colonised, between dispossession and dignity.

It means recovering solidarity across the Global South, recognising in Palestine the mirror of Africa’s partition, of Latin America’s conquest, of the Trail of Tears in North America.

And it means decolonising faith traditions themselves. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain strands of justice, compassion and coexistence. These must be elevated above the old myth of conquest. To continue to sanctify the delusion of being chosen at the expense of others is to trap humanity in Abraham’s script, endlessly replaying the annihilation of Canaan.

Beyond Abraham
The delusional story of Abraham ought to be read not as destiny but as warning. When any people believe themselves chosen to erase others, humanity suffers.

The Canaanites were wiped off. Native Americans were wiped off. Africans were stripped of land, freedom and memory. And today, Palestinians face the same fate.

The tragedy is not simply that Abraham once marched from Mesopotamia to Canaan. It is that, in the 21st century, with drones and tanks and surveillance satellites, the world still allows that delusion to dictate its politics.

Conclusion: Justice in Spite of Myth
The Israeli–Palestinian crisis is not an inevitable clash of faiths. It is not the fulfilment of prophecy. It is a modern colonial struggle, hiding behind an ancient story.

The task for our time is clear. We must strip away the myth. We must name land theft, occupation and erasure for what they are. And we must stand, not with conquerors, but with the dispossessed.

Justice for Palestine, and indeed for all peoples once erased by conquest, requires rejecting the myth of being chosen once and for all. Humanity’s future depends on it.

Dr. EK Gwuru writes from Nkolo Ikembe.

State-Sponsored Bigotry Is a Precursor to Catastrophe.

When an officer of state power amplifies hate speech, she does not merely join the mob; she licenses it. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, chairman of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM), has, for nearly a decade, held a position that ought to embody fairness, bridge-building, and dignity for every Nigerian abroad. Yet, by lending her voice to a vile post that referred to fellow Nigerian citizens as “monkeys” and “gorillas,” she crossed a red line that history warns us must never be normalized.

This is not a gaffe. It is not harmless banter. It is not politics as usual. Words carry weight, and when those words emanate from the seat of government, they carry lethal consequences. In Nazi Germany, Jews were first dehumanized as “rats” and “vermin” before they were herded into gas chambers. In Rwanda, the Tutsi were called “inyenzi” (cockroaches) before the machetes began their gruesome work. In Darfur, entire villages were destroyed after years of Arabs painting Black African groups as “slaves.” The trail from derogatory epithets to genocidal action is not theoretical. It is bloody fact.

That is why Mrs. Dabiri-Erewa’s action is not a minor lapse. It is an endorsement of bigotry with echoes of historical calamity. It is particularly grotesque because it comes from a public officer tasked with protecting Nigerians from prejudice in foreign lands, even as she normalizes prejudice against them at home. How can she champion the dignity of Nigerians abroad while trampling on the dignity of millions at home?

Let us be clear: there can be no hierarchy of citizenship in Nigeria. There are no second-class Nigerians; they are no “others” to be mocked or maligned. We are sons and daughters of this republic, bound by the same constitution, entitled to the same respect. When officials forget this, they do more than inflame old wounds, they imperil national unity itself.

To every official who harbors bigotry in their heart and lets it spill into public life, this must be your reminder: words can kill. The Nigerian civil war is still within living memory; millions perished not only because of bullets but because propaganda painted a section of this nation as less than human. If you have forgotten that lesson, you are unfit for the offices you hold.

Mrs. Dabiri-Erewa owes the nation an unreserved apology, not a mealy-mouthed justification, not a half-hearted clarification. An apology. More than that, the Nigerian government must take this as a chance to make clear, once and for all, that ethnic bigotry will not be tolerated from its officials. Silence is complicity, and complicity in hate speech is complicity in potential atrocity.

Nigeria cannot afford leaders who play with the matches of ethnic hatred in a country already drenched in the gasoline of division. History has taught us, in the starkest possible terms, where such recklessness leads. We ignore those lessons at our peril.

And while at that, is Mrs Dabiri-Erewa a lifetime DG of NIDCOM?

Dr. EK Gwuru wites form Nkolo Ikembe.

The Igbo Were Never Kingdoms: Reclaiming a Republican Legacy - EK Gwuru, Ph.D

Among the peoples of Africa, the Igbo of Southeast Nigeria stand apart for their unique political philosophy. For centuries, the Igbo thrived without kings or centralized monarchies. We built a society in which every village was autonomous, every adult man had a voice, and authority flowed upward from the people, not downward from a throne. We gave the world republican democracy long before Athen knew what republic means.

Yet, in recent decades, a disturbing woke trend has emerged. Communities across Igboland now describe themselves as “ancient kingdoms,” inventing crowns and palaces where none historically existed. Coronations are staged with borrowed regalia, chiefs are styled “His Royal Majesty,” and towns with centuries-old republican traditions now market themselves as monarchies.
This reinvention may appear harmless, but it is, in truth, a distortion of Igbo history. To describe an Igbo town as a “kingdom” is not only historically inaccurate but culturally misleading and politically dangerous. We know that the origin of monarchies, anywhere on earth. Is banditry. It is against Chukwu Okike Abiama to suggest that all men are not born equal.

Precolonial Igbo society was marked by a system of acephalous republicanism. There were no central monarchs. Instead, power was dispersed across several institutions:
i. The Village Assembly (Ama Ala): The ultimate decision-making body, where every adult male had the right to speak. Decisions were reached by persuasion and consensus.
ii. Age-Grade Systems (Ogbo): Civic groups that ensured discipline, security, and development.
iii. Councils of Elders (Ndi Ichie): Senior men whose wisdom guided, but who remained accountable to the people.
iv. Title Societies (e.g., Ozo): Structures of merit and prestige earned by service and achievement, not inherited through bloodline.

Yes, some communities used titles such as Eze or Obi, but these did not correspond to monarchs in the mould of the Benin Oba or Sokoto Sultan. The Igbo eze was often a ritual figurehead, symbolic representative, or spiritual custodian, never an absolute ruler.
The Igbo proverb says it clearly: Igbo enwe eze; the Igbo have no king.


When the British invaders colonised Igboland, they struggled to apply indirect rule. In the North, emirs served as convenient intermediaries. In Yoruba land, kings fulfilled the same role. The Igbo, however, had no monarchs. To solve this “problem,” the British manufactured rulers called Warrant Chiefs.
These men, many chosen arbitrarily, were given colonial certificates of authority. Lacking legitimacy, they deployed banditry and ruled harshly, sparking resentment. The Aba Women’s War of 1929 was a direct revolt against the abuses of these imposed chiefs.
Over time, however, families of warrant chiefs entrenched themselves as hereditary rulers, constructing palaces, inventing genealogies, and retroactively branding themselves as “ancient kings.”
Today, these distortions live on in the growing number of Igbo “kingdoms.”

One may cite Onitsha as an Igbo town with a king. However, it needs be said that the people of Idu (Igbo people) were escaping from the Ogu Idu na Oba (the war between the people of Idu and the marauding people of Ife with their Oba. Onitsha today proudly proclaims its Obi as the custodian of one of Igboland’s most prominent “kingdoms.” But Onitsha’s monarchy is a historical exception, not the Igbo norm. Onitsha returnees from across the Niger (though Igbo who sojourned in Benin) but retained elements of their Edo-Benin culture, including kingship traditions. To hold up Onitsha as proof that the Igbo were monarchic is misleading. Onitsha is an outlier, not a template.

In the case of Nri often described as the “cradle of Igbo civilization” and home to an ancient kingship system, their priests exercised ritual and spiritual authority, their power was not political or coercive. They were respected for their role in cleansing abominations and preserving Igbo cosmology, not for issuing decrees or ruling subjects. To call Nri an “ancient kingdom” is to impose monarchic language on what was essentially a sacred priesthood.

For the Aro Confederacy, they commanded influence across Igboland and beyond, but it was built on networks of trade, religion, and alliances, not centralized monarchy. The so-called “Eze Aro” was one among equals, and Aro dominance stemmed from the oracle of Ibini Ukpabi and its commercial might. Describing Arochukwu as a kingdom erases the federated, republican nature of its governance.

In recent years, many Nsukka-area towns have embraced kingship titles, often justifying them with thin claims of “ancient stools.” These were autonomous communities that only acquired “royal fathers” in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The proliferation of such “kingdoms” has created endless disputes over who holds the “true” crown, a problem unknown in authentic Igbo republican life.

The kingdom narrative persists because:
i. Warrant chiefs became hereditary rulers, later rebranded as “traditional rulers.”
ii. In a Nigeria where monarchs are revered, Igbo communities fear being seen as “lesser” without a king.
iii. State and federal governments often channel patronage through traditional rulers, incentivizing communities to invent monarchs.
iv. Younger generations are disconnected from precolonial traditions and readily accept crowns as symbols of authenticity.
v. Pentecostalism and Western fascination with royalty romanticize crowns and thrones.


There are inherent dangers in the false kingship we now have in Igboland:
i. The more “kingdoms” we invent, the further we drift from historical truth thereby destroying our history.
ii. Igbo uniqueness lies in its republicanism, not monarchy. To abandon this is to erase what sets us apart.
iii. Artificial monarchies breed endless disputes, two or three “kings” in the same town, rival claims to thrones, and inter-village rivalries.
iv. Where kingship takes root, hereditary privilege trumps Igbo traditions of self-made prestige. This renders our Umunna model irrelevant.
v. At a time when democracy is under threat globally, we risk abandoning our ancient, indigenous form of participatory governance.

We can reclaim our republican legacy. To achieve this and remain true to ourselves, urgent steps are required:
i. Teach Igbo children that their ancestors were republicans, not monarchists.
ii. Our universities must research and publish accessible works on Igbo governance.
iii. The Nigerian media and Igbo stakeholder should stop uncritically parroting “ancient kingdom” narratives.
iv. Our villages must resist the urge to invent crowns for prestige or government recognition.
v. Our festivals, films, and literature should glorify Igbo republicanism as a legacy equal in dignity to the monarchies of other nations.

There is the fierce urgency to rally behind honesty and repudiate any attempt to rewrite our history. It is not shameful that the Igbo had no kings. On the contrary, it is our pride. While other nations bowed to crowns, the Igbo bowed only to the collective will of the people. While others exalted monarchs, the Igbo exalted the village assembly.

Onitsha may have its Obi, Nri its priest-kings, Arochukwu its oracle, but these are exceptions within a broader republican fabric. To inflate them into proof of “ancient Igbo kingdoms” is to commit historical fraud.

We are very clear: the Igbo were never kingdoms. We were, and remain, a people of the republic. To our misguided communities who cling to crowns, your ancestors would not recognize them. Your people deserve better. And history demands honesty.

Dr. EK Gwuru can be reached at Nkolo Ikembe.

The Danger of Forgetting History: White Supremacist Gangs in Global Politics

In the modern political landscape, particularly in Europe and the United States, a disturbing trend is emerging; white supremacist and anti-immigrant political parties, disguised as populist movements, are steadily gaining traction. They present themselves as the protectors of national identity and heritage, while simultaneously sowing division and inciting hate against immigrants, especially those of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent. But this political shift is not just a modern issue, it is deeply rooted in historical injustice. The current rise of these groups is more than just a cultural or political dilemma; it is a dangerous step backward; a revision of history that must be called out for the lie it perpetuates.

Let’s go back in history; slavery, colonization, and imperialism is one that Europe and the United States would prefer to forget, but it is a history that cannot and should not be erased. The transatlantic slave trade, in which millions of Africans were kidnapped from their homeland, branded as property, and transported to the Americas to work as slaves, was a brutal crime against humanity. The scars left by these atrocities are felt to this day, not only in Africa but throughout the African diaspora.

The legacy of this grave injustice doesn't stop at the shackles of slavery, it continues in the form of neo-imperialist policies, economic exploitation, and a continued disregard for the rights and lives of people of African descent. In the scramble for Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European powers sliced the continent as if it were a mere cake, with no regard for the people who called it home. Borders were drawn arbitrarily, nations were fractured, and the cultural and social fabric of African societies was irreparably damaged.

The very same Western nations that today position themselves as guardians of democracy and human rights were once the architects of oppression, violence, and division. In doing so, they laid the foundation for centuries of racial inequality that persists today. The global narrative of Africa as a “dark continent,” void of history, culture, or contribution to the world, is an enduring lie, rooted in centuries of colonial propaganda. Yet, Africa has always been a land of wealth, its natural resources, gold, diamonds, and rare minerals continue to fuel the global economy, often to the detriment of the continent’s own people.

Fast forward to the present day, and the echoes of these historical injustices can be clearly heard in the rhetoric of the political far-right. In their attempt to frame immigration as a threat to national security and cultural purity, these white supremacist political groups conveniently forget the history that led to the demographic changes they now decry. It is no accident that the very nations that once profited from the brutal extraction of African manpower and resources now paint Africa as a land of poverty and danger, sending its people fleeing to Europe and the Americas in search of safety and opportunity.

The rise of populist political movements in Europe and the United States has brought with it a worrying wave of xenophobia and racism. These political actors seek to build a future on exclusion, promoting the idea that immigration, particularly from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, is an existential threat to Western civilization. The danger of this thinking is not just in the policies it advocates, but in the broader worldview it cultivates: one that disregards the complexities of history, erases the enormous contributions of Africans and their now descendant-immigrants, and fosters division rather than unity.

But it is a historical truth that the nations now seeking to turn inward and protect their borders want to ignore that their nations are built on the blood and brutal exploitation of the resources of other lands and peoples. Colonial powers like Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal enriched themselves through the plunder of Africa. The US, built on the forced labour of enslaved Africans, reaped the rewards of the slave trade, while also shaping a world order that perpetuates inequality. These same nations now turn their backs on the descendants of those they once enslaved, casting them as outsiders in the very countries that owe so much to their ancestors’ suffering.

Central to the rhetoric of these white supremacist political parties is the myth of “cultural purity.” They argue that the influx of immigrants threatens the cultural fabric of their societies, that the influx of people from different parts of the world will somehow erode what they consider to be “authentic” or “native” culture. This is an absurd notion, rooted in an idealized vision of a homogeneous past that never existed. Besides, they are the only ones who went out to destroy the authentic or native culture of others.

Cultures are dynamic, not static. Civilizations throughout history have been shaped by migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas. Kemet (ancient Egypt) – the black land; after the invasion from all fortune seeking nations became a melting pot of African, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean influences. The civilizations of the Nile Valley did not arise in isolation but were products of millennia of interaction with neighbouring regions. The Arabs, the Phoenicians, and the Greeks all played their part in shaping the culture and history of Egypt and, by extension, the whole of North Africa.

The idea that any nation or culture is purely one thing, unaffected by the contributions of others, is a historical falsehood. Europe itself is a mosaic of cultures, shaped by centuries of migration and exchange. The same can be said for the United States, a nation built on the forced labour and ingenuity of people from every corner of the globe.

If we are to move forward as a global society, we must first confront the past. The white supremacist movements rising in Europe and the United States are not merely misguided or reactionary; they are dangerous revisionists, seeking to rewrite history and erase the contributions of people of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent to the societies they now occupy. They perpetuate the myth that the West has always been “pure” and untainted by the violence and exploitation of the past.

We must demand that these movements be held accountable; not just for their harmful rhetoric but for the policies they seek to implement, which risk plunging the world back into an era of division, hatred, and violence. We must resist the urge to allow history to be forgotten or twisted, and instead, champion a future where the injustices of the past are acknowledged, and the contributions of all peoples are celebrated.

We look to the word of James Baldwin, a descendant of kidnapped Africans to the USA: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” The white supremacist gangs masquerading as political parties in the West are not just a threat to immigrants, they are a threat to the very idea of a shared, inclusive humanity. It is time we confront their lies, recognize the heinous crimes of the past, and work towards a future of justice and equality for all.

Dr. EK Gwuru writes from Nkolo Ikembe.