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Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin’s post arguing that schools are built to hide Africa’s place in the world has drawn hundreds of thousands of views. Some of what he lists is documented history. Some of it is a slogan stretched past the evidence.
A post by Nigerian investigative journalist David Hundeyin has been shared more than 10,000 times since Tuesday morning. He was answering a simpler observation: schools teach the Amazon and almost never mention the Congo Basin, even though that forest is one of the planet’s great carbon stores. Hundeyin treated the omission as a pattern, not an accident. European-style education, he wrote, is designed to keep people, including Africans, ignorant of Africa’s place in the economic and natural world.
The thread is worth reading carefully, because it mixes facts that belong in every textbook with claims that do not survive a check.
The Congo Basin is missing from the syllabus
The Congo point is where David Hundeyin is strongest. The basin is the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, after the Amazon, and it holds the largest tropical peatland complex on earth. A 2022 study in Nature Geoscience put about 29 billion tonnes of carbon in those peatlands alone, roughly 28 percent of the world’s tropical peat carbon, across about 167,600 square kilometres. Recent work also describes the Congo rainforest as a major driver of the global land carbon sink, at a time when parts of the Amazon have weakened or flipped toward being a source. Calling it “the planet breathing” is rhetoric. Calling it absent from most syllabi is fair.
The mineral claim needs a qualifier. A figure of about $24 trillion in untapped Congolese resources is widely repeated and has been tied to U.S. International Trade Administration assessments. It is an estimate of deposits in the ground, not an audited reserve, and nobody has drilled the whole basin. What is not in dispute is the concentration: the Democratic Republic of Congo holds roughly half the world’s known cobalt and produces about 70 percent of global supply, is a top copper producer, and is central to coltan, tin, diamonds, and gold. The country remains among the poorest on earth by income per person. That gap is the story, not the round number.
The history David Hundeyin points to is real
Several of the historical examples David Hundeyin cites are real and under-taught.
The uranium used in the first atomic bombs came in large part from the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga, then the Belgian Congo. Union Minière director Edgar Sengier had already stockpiled rich ore on Staten Island before the United States bought it for the Manhattan Project. Congolese pitchblende was extraordinarily high-grade. Colonel Ken Nichols, who ran the procurement, called the mine a freak of nature. Researchers and Congolese civil-society accounts say Shinkolobwe furnished a large share of the uranium for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and fed the plutonium work behind Fat Man at Nagasaki. Canada and the American West also supplied uranium. The Congo’s role is still the part most classrooms skip.
The Camp Thiaroye massacre is also real. On December 1, 1944, French forces killed West African riflemen at a camp near Dakar. The men had fought for France in Europe and were demanding unpaid wages before going home. Colonial authorities put the death toll at 35. In 2014, President François Hollande acknowledged more than 70 dead. A 2025 report submitted to Senegal’s president called the killing premeditated and covered up, and put the most credible estimate at 300 to 400. France has been asked to apologize. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a colonial crime with a paper trail.
West African soldiers in French uniform were important in both world wars, including the liberation of southern France. They were not the reason “the country of France exists.” Free French forces were multinational, and France’s survival turned on Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the internal Resistance as well as colonial troops. The accurate sentence is narrower and stronger: France used African soldiers to fight a European war, then shot some of them rather than pay them.
Where David Hundeyin runs ahead of the record
The same narrowing is needed elsewhere.
African labor and African commodities were central to the plantation Americas. The transatlantic trade carried about 12.5 million Africans across the ocean, and the Caribbean, Brazil, and the U.S. South were built on that forced labor. For Saint Vincent and the wider Caribbean, that is not a side note. It is the origin of the plantation economy. It is not “the entire reason both American continents exist in their current form.” Indigenous nations, European settlement, later Asian indenture, and migration after slavery all shaped the map. Contact with Africa from the fifteenth century mattered enormously to European wealth. It was not the sole cause of “Western civilization.”
The two world wars were not essentially fights over who would own Africa. The First World War had a colonial dimension, including the seizure of German colonies, but it began in the Balkans and was fought mainly in Europe. The Second World War was driven by Nazi expansion in Europe and Japanese expansion in Asia. African campaigns were real. They were not the war.
The Cold War was not cold in Africa. Angola, Mozambique, the Congo, the Horn, Namibia, and the front line of apartheid South Africa were killing grounds for proxy armies. So were Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Central America. Africa was a major theater. It was not most of the war.
The claim that the Ukraine war and the war in the Sahel are the same conflict, and that Ukraine is France’s proxy army for retaking Niger’s uranium, is not supported by public evidence. France did lose operational control of Nigerien uranium after the 2023 coup. Niger was an important supplier to France’s nuclear fleet, not the only one. France has also armed Ukraine against Russia. Those are two facts. They do not prove one war.
Follow the cocoa, the hides and the gold
On trade, the pattern David Hundeyin points to is clearer than the slogans. Cocoa does not grow in Switzerland. The beans in Swiss chocolate come overwhelmingly from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, with Nigeria a smaller producer. Italy’s leather industry does import hides, including the red goatskin associated with Kano, and re-exports them as Italian leather. Not every hide in a Florentine workshop started in Kano. Dubai is a major gold trading hub, and investigations have documented large flows of Sudanese gold through the UAE, including conflict gold. Israel has a diamond cutting and trading industry and no diamond mines. The DRC is a major source of diamonds and gold, and smuggling from the east is documented. “Israel and the UAE control the global markets and are stealing both resources on an industrial basis” collapses a messy trading system into a single theft. The mess is real. The single-sentence version is not.
Where David Hundeyin is right
The underlying complaint David Hundeyin makes still stands after the cuts. Curricula written in the colonial period, and many that replaced them, taught African rivers as European discoveries and African labor as a footnote. A reply under his post made the old classroom point: secondary schools still say Mungo Park “discovered” the Niger, a river people had lived on for centuries. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains the book readers in the thread are pointing each other toward, and it is a better guide than a viral list, because Rodney also counted African elites who sold the trade.
The useful version of this argument is specific. Name the peat. Name Shinkolobwe. Name Thiaroye. Name the cocoa and the cobalt. Then stop where the evidence stops. Africa’s absence from the syllabus is real. Filling the gap with a claim that every war since 1492 was secretly about Africa does not repair the syllabus. It gives the next denialist an easy exit.
More from VPN: Africa coverage.
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