HomeOld_PostsAfrica: Aren’t you tired of being cheated? – Part One

Africa: Aren’t you tired of being cheated? – Part One

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AS the New Year begins and wears on, isn’t it time to ruminate, to take stock, to reflect, to introspect?
I am sure your response is an overwhelming ‘yes’.
But the question is: Reflecting over what?
Africa is where it is today because of a past in which it has been shaped, a past in which it has been an onlooker, a passenger, or rather, baggage over matters of its own existence.
Today it has been appropriated and re-appropriated.
It lives on a borrowed identity and in borrowed time.
A continent of rich history, rich culture, rich civilisation; endowed with unparalleled human and natural resources, yet living the lie of the poorest continent, full of internecine wars, trapped in filth and disease.
Shouldn’t we all shout in unison: “Cry, the beloved continent!”
All because of the West who we continue to adore with ironic fascination!
This article is a gentle nudge to my fellow Africans to read between the lines and come back to their senses.
Africa has been removed from its natural orbit by these predators and destroyers using various chameleonic strategies.
So pythonic have been our detractors that we have been, and continue to be, beguiled by their wiles which they fashion and refashion with each changing circumstance to maintain the rider-horse grip on our people and our resources.
We have pathetically fitted into their systems without the slightest idea of why these systems have been created.
We wear other people’s systems as if they are our natural garments.
Political systems, economic systems, social systems, cultural systems, ideological systems, systems of thought — the list is endless.
Allow me to begin by reminding you that those who create systems are not fools. They create systems to serve themselves.
Logically so.
The wise don’t create systems that outbank their capacity to control them.
Only fools do that, for in due course they are consumed by the systems of their own creation.
The wise are experts at monitoring and evaluating their systems to see if they are still true to the purposes for which they were created.
When they realise they are failing or serving unintended masters; they destroy them forthwith and replace them with new systems designed for either old or new purposes.
Yes, it takes courage to admit the West is clever; so clever they have successfully created systems which their victims have worshipped for ages on end to their own advantage.
They have stolen African civilisation and rebranded it their own.
Then they created the institution of slavery, buttressed it with the ideology of racism and used Africans and Indians to build their centres of commerce using African resources.
Then they created the institution of colonialism which turned both African human and natural resources into their commodities, successfully cheating the African through education and rebranded religions into believing that this world was not his home, but that his home was up above.
And when the Africans resisted direct occupation, the enemy morphed into a benevolent partner by giving Africans political independence without economic freedom.
We received these half-independences with smiles of gratitude, making them our benefactors while we sulked as beneficiaries.
The domination of Africa (under slavery and colonisation) by Europe and its allies in the social, political, economic and cultural spheres has been maintained through a composite system of ideological mechanisms and prescriptive theoretical formulations.
Most of these ideological rationalisations of colonialism are grounded in the period ironically called ‘The Enlightenment’ period.
The 18th Century was particularly a critical period of Europe’s great conspiracy against Africans especially.
This period was called ‘The Enlightenment’ because it was presumed to be a century of new rational, civilised thinking.
However, it was ironically a period that saw fresh theorisation justifying the earlier conception of ‘might is right’ (Bessie: 2001:20).
Let us now turn to the main trends of this ‘founding’ period which demonstrates how racism was constructed and theorised.
A quick glimpse of selected works of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Trevor-Roper will suffice to demonstrate how these so-called celebrated professors were architects of deception.
In his essay Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations (1748), David Hume advances the theory that history grows like an organism through stages such as infancy, youth and maturity.
This evolutionary character provides the context for his second essay, Of National Characters (1748), where he claims that negroes are naturally inferior to the whites.
He says:
“I am about to suspect that the negroes and in general all other species of men (for they are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.
There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor any individual eminent either in action or speculation: No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.” (Cited in Eze: 1997:33)
Hume’s mentality follows in the racist tradition of Aristotle who earlier on had claimed that certain groups of people are more suited for physical labour and therefore are naturally destined to be servants of those naturally made superior. Aristotle had argued:
“That men of little genius and great bodily strength, are by nature destined to serve, and those of better capacity, to command; that the natives of Greece, and of some of other countries, being naturally superior in genius, have natural right to empire; and that the rest of mankind, being naturally stupid, are destined to labour and slavery.” (Cited in ibid: 34)
By inference, the African is among the ‘naturally stupid’ as illustrated by their subjection to slavery owing to their ‘bodily strength’.
The logic: To make Africans believe they are enslaved because it is natural.
Because God has ordained it so through differential genetic engineering which leaves one colour inferior.
And all this coming from enlightened philosophers!
No.
These are not enlightening anyone.
They are cheating everyone including their own who develop misplaced condescension.
On the other hand, Africans are cheated most because they develop corresponding inferiority complexes which in turn kill their capacity to think, to create and to innovate, leaving them in limbo, always looking up to their oppressor for everything, including their next meal.
This is how house-niggers are fashioned – through the systematic indoctrination of philosophies justifying empire.

1 COMMENT

  1. Who is to blame guilty in the frist degree? human trafficking slavery,rape, dysfunctional families,separation, murder and disease,theft and many more to mention in the name of the Law. What Law?whose law?

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