The Caribs’ Leap.

“In 1651, about 40 among the fast dwindling population of the indigenous inhabitants of Grenada (an Island country in North America) were dangerously cornered by heavily armed French colonists. Having their backs against a cliff, the hapless people faced a bleak dilemma---they either got killed or be captured---but they chose a third option. They all threw themselves into the raging sea and perished in agony. This historical event has since been christened, ‘The Caribs’ Leap’”

--- As narrated by the mother of Steve McQueen (The Director of “12 Years a Slave”).

This sad story reminds me of the Second World War even though it took place between 1939 and 1945...long before I was born. I have something of a "morbid" interest in that horrendous war...so much that I have read practically all the books on the war and watched almost every movie made in regard to it.     

The first irony of the brutal war though was that, with the exception of the Jews, the other major victims of the war on the Allied side were the British and the French.

In the second irony, these two countries were the primary beneficiaries of the notorious scramble for, and partitioning of Africa and the Caribbean Islands for economic reasons in the periods between 1881 and 1914.

In their bids to achieve their economic objectives, the British and the French committed outrageously bloody evils against their colonial subjects. The cold-blooded murder in Grenada was just a tip of the iceberg of their massive acts of terrors and horrors against humanity.

There was the Aba riot of 1929 during which several harmless and innocent women were murdered in cold blood in the eastern part of Nigeria by British troops. There was also the Algeria massacre where innocent men, women and children were “sprayed” with machine guns by French troops. This act was carried out as reprisals for the death of a French soldier who was suspected to have been killed by the then Algerian freedom fighters.

Even America, as a colony of Britain, will never forget in a hurry all the atrocities committed against its people by the British colonists. By the way, this was one of the stories I had to read compulsorily while preparing to become an American citizen.

Several cases of murders, rapes, looting of treasures and abominable acts of “Man's inhumanity to Man” took place in all the colonies under the brutal, selfish reigns of (Great?) Britain and France.

But as fate would have it, both Britain and France (the then crazy superpowers) were “paid back in their own coins” during the Second World War. Talk of the Law of Karma. The British and the French people were not only terribly humiliated but also “incinerated” by Hitler’s German military tactic called the "Blitzkrieg" (lightning war). All of a sudden, the two countries lost their powers and empires. 

The biggest irony of it all was the fact that it took peoples from the British and the French colonies, such as the African soldiers and most especially, the American troops to save these two once horrible countries from Germany.  

It was shortly after the war that many African colonies...including Nigeria...confidently began to demand for independence. They knew fully well that both the British and the French had been too battered and demoralized by Germany to have any strength left for another war.