PART one looked at the widespread adoption of fake accents, bleaching of our black faces and donning of false hair as some of the symptoms which express, outwardly that is, an inner and somewhat unfortunate condition which mirrors our lack of self-confidence in ourselves, in our values and beliefs, that condition which deep down betrays our desire to be like our former colonial masters!
It is unfortunate that quite a large chunk of our people in Africa, especially those who consider themselves elites, spend the rest of their lives trying hard to mimic the lives of our former masters.
The questions that arise relate to how this disease of self-hatred and self-denigration came about and what is to be done about it? It is a disease which, unless it is cured in one form or other will continue to be corrosive and disabling in everything we do as a race.
Perhaps an example which dramatises in a forceful manner, as Chinua Achebe used to say, where the rain began to beat us, is to cite what Father Biehler suggested as the solution to the challenge posed by the recently conquered African of the 1890s.
“Father Biehler is so convinced of the hopelessness of regenerating the Mashona’s, wrote Lord Grey from Chishawasha in January 1897,“whom he regards as the most hopeless of mankind that he states that the only chance of the future of the race is to exterminate the whole people both male and female, over the age of 14.”
The holocaust father Biehler was proposing then was to be undertaken in addition to the genocide which the British army had already been committing during that same war of African resistance!
One may ask: why the proposal for such a demonic solution by a supposedly holy father of the Roman Catholic Church? Because a wholesale elimination of all older Africans would deliver a death blow to a whole belief system considered then as the seedbed of rebellion and resistance; in other words one fell swoop of unprecedented bloodletting across the board would create a new and clean slate, a tabula rasa of some sort, a new beginning with the least contaminated of African youths! The overriding logic of this proposed holocaust was to remake the African not in the image of God but in that of the West!
The holocaust proposed by father Biehler was rejected by colonial authorities of that time not on humanitarian grounds as normal people would have expected but for the simple reason that it would have immediately deprived British settlers of abundant cheap African labour!
The overall significance of father Biehler’s holocaust proposal is that it dramatises the degree to which Christian missionaries were prepared to go simply to smash to smithereens, once and for all time, an African world view with its accompanying belief systems and values.
This kind of raw and undiluted hostility towards anything African was to remain as a pervasive white supremacist ideology which informed almost all activities undertaken by almost all white people who came to Africa for one reason or other!
It was unfortunate that those very Christian missionaries who harboured such hostility towards African values were let loose all over Africa; they took complete charge of two critical institutions in Africa, that is, religion and education, which, in turn, shaped the outlook and values of African elites who by and large run the show in post-colonial Africa today!
Put in graphic terms to be educated under colonial rule in practice meant that one was expected without fail and as a matter of course to de-Africanise oneself; similarly, to be modern and advanced meant that one had to become Western in outlook by all means necessary at the expense of indigenous values; it meant one had to suppress and or forgo in one way or other those very characteristics which defined one as African.
By all accounts colonial modernity of which Christianity and education were only two of the many aspects of it became a kind of harsh and unforgiving god, an exclusive and jealous one in all respects, a god who never ceased to direct vast amounts of scorn and derision towards anything African and indigenous!
Such relentless propaganda spewed without fail in church and at school and even at the work-place has no doubt left an indelible mark on several generations of Africans. Colonial modernity sired by imperial powers demanded total loyalty and commitment from our elites; it frowned upon anything African as backward and uncivilised, a kind of barbarism which one was expected to outgrow sooner rather than later!
The paradox of course is that, that kind of modernity did not at all accept in full those African devotees loyal to it! As far as educated Africans were concerned the road to modernity was not a straight forward one; it had its own twists and turns and full acceptance of the African by its proponents remained out of question!
Here is how Charles Mungoshi defined the dilemma of the elite in Africa, the paradox that they continue to live even up to this day! In Waiting for the Rain uncle Kuruku says to Lucifer who is about to go overseas for further education:
“Out there, where you are going, your heart is just the colour of your face: murky and dirty. And,no amount of sleeping with the whitest of their women folk nor any amount of eating at the same table with them will ever make you clean enough in their eyes.So,go there, see everything and envy nothing.”
And uncle Kuruku is dead right! The racism which all blacks encounter all over Europe and America and is often taken as normal is well documented!
In light of the above it is obvious that some of the problems that we face in Africa stem from our mind-sets which were largely shaped by our detractors, mind-sets which dare not deconstruct to the full the colonial state bequeathed us by our defeated colonial enemies.Why? Because it is largely an elite incapable of imagining an alternative model to replace the colonial state!
The elites who run African countries today are largely unoriginal, in the main imitative and hardly a creative lot nearly in all respects!This handicap partly explains why the land reform programme in Zimbabwe which is a game changer in the economy in the long run was largely supported by peasants and not as many elites!
It is not surprising too that our education systems remain largely Eurocentric and continue to produce mind-sets forever anchored in and directed at the West and not Africa!
For example we continue to produce economists who borrow lock stock and barrel discourses from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two Western institutions whose core business is to ensure that all developing countries remain dependent on a largely predatory West!
Our education systems also produce engineers who can hardly design original technology which Africa needs so desperately but does not have!
Last but not least our education systems continue to produce scholars who feel secure and validated only when their work is endorsed by outsiders, preferably whites!