Injustice
© Copyright Iwan Groot, 2014
140cm x 180cm
taller than me and not so far from the width of my height either teehee =D
This is a painting that I started planning in 2011-2012, and heavily inspired by a paper I wrote in the year before about injustice and human right violations in the Ivory Coast. In 2012 semester i also took a class about the known history of Africa and what has happened over the ages.
Many people don't know how africa has been abused and mistreated in recent history, the slave trade is over and old colonialism is over but post-colonialism in a form of "diplomacy", "economics", and politics,
In past times they have been robbed of awesome artwork, culture, power, riches, kingdoms, jewels, and lifestyles, the western world mainly has made africans dependent on a system that has doomed themselves to poverty with little way to escape, and the effects of the slave trade make some africans feel like others think they are inferior, that they can not get good jobs, that they only can be poor.
1500 BC till 1500 AD Africa was one of the most powerful entities, with grand kingdoms that spanded the sahara, the swahili coast, and south africa, carthage, senegal, congo, savannah, ethiopia, Nubia, egypt. they traded with europe, middle east, asia,
ostrich feathers, ebony, ivory, gold, diamonds, cows, so much more. though much of africa history is unknown, it was not inferior at all, as a continent is much bigger than you probably think.
europe was in huts during the dark ages while africa was trading across the world, and building great architecture, art and more.
In more modern history it has been robbed of oil, gas, precious minerals, diamonds, gold, chocolate, whatever resource you name it
in africa peanuts are so cheap and sell next to nothing but people pay a nice amount of money for some good peanut butter from the states, with chocolate, you might like swiss chocolate or whatever and Ivory Coast sells about 40% of the chocolate in the world for almost nothing in comparison, coffee as well,i like coffee.
There is something wrong with the picture of how much they earn with the resources and how much we pay for the final product.
UN can change the president through manipulation and hacking of the media, "freedom of press" but not to be heard. they can manipulate to put new and worse rulers, for Ivory coast for example they put a president in that is not even from the country in power that sold all of Ivory Coasts resources to France again, (a major power of the UN) (and i have nothing against french in saying this, just all governments are corrupt in some way) in Libya, Ghadafi was a good leader/ruler until recent incidents where they gave arms to the rebels to overthrow him only to put a worse ruler, and it happens all over africa and the world. and then those with the arms provided from UN went to another country and tried to reclaim their old kingdom and city of Timbuktu and restore the Tuareg kingdom from 1300 AD. and that is the crisis that happened in Mali, some have seen the movie Hotel Rwanda, well the same thing happened in Sudan for about two decades, the same thing is happening in Congo now, but you know why they are not being stopped by the Peace-keeping Un forces, because it doesn’t help our economy, so they don’t care.
For more details on symbolism and such check out the two youtube links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROjVHMjjoy8&list=PL0Q7dG-v7wUxLhl2QmYvh9D_gVK0Mw_5p&index=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8PeumiPlI0&list=PL0Q7dG-v7wUxLhl2QmYvh9D_gVK0Mw_5p&index=2
