By Nthungo YaAfrika
‘ON The battlefield of culture’ is the title used by the late Cheik Anta Diop when dedicating his book, Civilisation or Barbarism, An Authentic Anthropology, to his late dear friend Alioune Diop.
I will quote verbatim the dedication.
“I dedicate this book to the memory of Alioune Diop who died on the Battlefield of African Culture. Alioune, you knew what you came to do on this earth: A life dedicated to others, nothing for yourself, everything for others, a heart filled with goodness and generosity, a soul steeped in nobility, a spirit always serene, simplicity personified.
Did the demiurge want to provide us with an example, an ideal of perfection, by calling you into existence?
Alas, the terrestrial community, to which you knew how to convey, better than anyone else, the message of human truthfulness that sprang from the inmost depths of your being, was deprived of you too soon. But the remembrance of you will never be erased from memory of African peoples, to whom you dedicated your life.
That is why I am dedicating this book to your memory, in witness to a brotherly friendship that is so strong than time.”
Cheik Anta Diop was born in Senegal in 1923 and died in 1986.
He lived for 63 years.
He was on the battlefield of culture all his adult life.
His participation on the battlefield of culture saw him becoming the most hated African by whites who did not want Africans to know their glorious antiquity history.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous dictum: “History is a fable agreed on,” is well and alive within white intellectuals, as far as our history is concerned.
To whites, our history begins with our enslavement, which was a ‘good’ thing as it ‘civilised’ us, making them our benefactors.
The battlefield of culture is not for the faint-hearted, as friends become foes and one becomes an island.
This is especially so when religion is involved.
Two main religions in Africa – Christianity and Islam – have divided, and are still dividing, us instead of uniting us, to the detriment of the motherland’s spiritual enlightenment.
Although these two religions are viewed as foreign by their African adherents, they are still proud to belong to them heart and soul.
Everything foreign is attractive.
Telling the followers that these religions originated from, the motherland is asking to be ridiculed.
This is where Cheik Anta Diop comes in with his research on our ancestors’ glorious history.
We are the only race on earth who has not yet won on the battlefield of culture, making us the scorn and ridicule of other races.
The Japanese won on their battlefield of culture when they expelled the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in the 16th Century when they saw their hypocritical behaviour towards them.
The Japanese saw that their converted people were becoming more loyal to the missionaries than their country.
When Japanese Christians took part in a rebellion, foreign priests were executed and the Spanish expelled.
After another rebellion, Japanese Christians were suppressed and put under surveillance for centuries thereafter.
In the 1640s, all Japanese suspected of being Christians were ruthlessly exterminated.
This Japan did to save itself from the first European attempt to mentally subvert, conquer and colonise it.
White Christianity never really took root in Asia, because Asia is not as rich, resource-wise as Africa.
Asians were, and still are, culturally correct as they are not easily swayed by other cultures, especially by wanting to miscegenerate, as compared to us Africans.
For a race to be prosperous, it must win on the battlefield of culture and examples of the victorious are America, Canada, China, the Asian Tigers and Russia.
Let’s take a look at China.
It was divided by opium and civil wars during the Ching Dynasty by the warlords and was brought to its knees by the Japan invasion.
But in 70 years, China has transformed itself from 100 years of humiliation to an economic and technology powerhouse.
This came into being by the vision of one man, Mao Tse Tung, uniting China, despite severe teething problems and being a butt of jokes at first, China is what it is now, a prosperous nation.
Coming back home.
It’s 64 years since Ghana got independent and the founding fathers failed to find a common ground to unite the motherland.
We are six years shy of how China transformed herself where are we?
Fifty-four countries divided to the core, with the possibility of being divided further, because of wars and unholy allegiances to those who do not want to see a united motherland.
With wisdom alone, we cannot win this battle; it has to be coupled with common sense.
King Solomon had wisdom but ended up being on the wrong side of Yahweh because he lacked common sense.
What then is common sense?
To be at peace with oneself as well as others and not to destroy the environment because you did not create it.
Our race must return to the basics, to reclaim what it lost and become the light of the world again.
The world system does not want us to succeed on the battlefield of culture and that is why most of those who participated in it, in the Diaspora, died young.
Those who come to mind are Bob Marley, Malcom X, Martin Luther King and Frantz Fanon.
They all died before the age of 40.
G.M. James, author of Stolen Legacy, died mysteriously in the US and Cheik Anta Diop was lucky to have lived up to 63 years.
Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a coup after a few years in power at the instigation of the US and Britain.
The system made sure it captured the liberation struggle by favouring missionary-trained African leaders to those not trained by missionaries.
The motherland is still chained to the laws and education of those who despise her.
The world system has turned Africans against each other by forcing Africans to adhere to their systems if they want aid for ‘development’.
Being an academic or intellectual does not make one culture-wise.
This is proven by enemies of Cheik Anta Diop whom he had among his peers.
At the University of Dakar Senegal, the world system convened an International Congress of Africaness and Cheik Anta Diop was not invited, yet his office was a stone’s throw away from where the conference was being held.
Those invited were less knowledgeable than him and the world system knew their low academic and intellectual depth and was comfortable with it.
They were afraid of Cheik Anta Diop’s knowledge about Africaness and did not want to be challenged.
Instead of African academics and intellectuals boycotting the conference in solidarity with Cheik Anta Diop, they stampeded towards it because they had been promised huge allowances for attending it.
This shows that then Dakar University was not independent and this brings me to ask this question: How many African universities are independent of foreign academic and intellectual interferences?
Those who join the battlefield of culture will never have peace, dead or alive, and it’s not for the feint-hearted and those who are materialistic.
Our culture, the story of our ancestors, must be taught by properly trained and spiritually correct cultural officers in order for it to be understood by pupils from ECD to university level for the motherland to regain its glorious past, forever more.
It will restore our religion (Maat) which is the mother/father of all religions, whose concept was truth, balance, order, harmony, law and justice — what the world desperately needs.
If the motherland education system was independent and not captured, the works of Chiek Anta Diop would have been embraced by now.
We must continue on the battlefield of culture.
We are not only Africans or blacks; we are the Nahasi and if we remove the ‘h’ we become the ‘now’/’nhasi’ people, according to Zezuru indigenous language of Zimbabwe.
I rest my case!
Nthungo YaAfrika, aka J.L. Mtembo, is a Hamite who strongly believes in the motherland renaissance.
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