THE conditioning of Africans on European values has far-reaching consequences. It removes Africans from participating in Africa’s development.
It makes the African intellectuals and policy-makers identify with European interests and spend their energy promoting European interests in Africa while the interests of their own people are scoffed at and neglected.
Apart from the European values promoted in our Constitution, it is important to cite statements that renowned intellectuals make in celebrating their admiration of European values in Africa against African values.
This will help the readers hear for themselves from the horses’ mouths and make their own judgments which may differ from mine.
A well-known Zimbabwean writer in English and award winning poet and novelist, Dambudzo Marechera, was proud to confess his addiction to European values and admiration of his rebelliousness against African society saying:
“I am the luggage no one will claim.
“The out-of-place turd, all deny responsibility; The incredulous sneer all tuck away beneath bland smiles; The loud fart all silently agree never happened.
“The sheer bad breath you politely confront with mouth-washed platitudes.
“After all, it’s poetry.
“I am the rat every dog secretly admires.
“The cat every dog secretly fears.
“The pervert every honest citizen surprises in his own mirror: Poet.”
Marechera’s boast about his rebelliousness against the values of his people reminds us of the English pop song that Achebe said he heard entitled, ‘I Ain’t Gonna Wash for a Week’ and wondered why it should occur to anyone to take such a vow when there were so many worthwhile resolutions to make in life.
But Achebe says it dawned on him later that:
“The singer belonged to the same culture which in an earlier age of self-satisfaction had blasphemed and said that cleanliness was next to godliness.
“So I saw him in a new light, a kind of divine administrator of vengeance.
“I make bold to say, however, that his offices would not be required in my society because we did not commit the sin of turning hygiene into a god.”
Lest there be confusion in the mind of the readers on how the relationship of the writer to his society in African culture differs from that of the writer in European society, we shall let the African writers who follow the aesthetics and values of their forefathers, explain to us.
This will help confirm the point we are making about the addiction of African people on European values and the extent to which it has damaged African minds and ill-equipped them to carry out meaningful development programmes in their societies in Africa.
Okot tells us that:
“The culture that associates art and the artist with filth and anti-social behaviour is unheard of in Africa.
“The ascetic tradition, the attempted fleeing from life, from full participation in the tremendous and deepest challenges of the life-process, with its risks and dangers, with its joys of success and brief sorrows of failure and loss; the worldview that equates poverty, hunger and filth with holiness; the traditions of so-called ‘great’ but foreign religions, is wholly meaningless in African thought.
“The African tradition lives in the thick of the battle of life, here and now.”
Achebe also says that Europe, not Africa, taught African writers and artistes that, “A writer or artiste lives on the fringes of society, wearing a beard and a peculiar dress and generally behaving in a strange, unpredicted way.
“He is in revolt against society, which in turn looks on him with suspicion if not hostility.
‘The last thing that society would dream of doing is to put him in charge of anything, which is why some of the writers and artistes are so eager for society to treat them with hostility and behave as if it already does.”
Marechera is quite candid about where his idea of the right of the individual to rebel against his society comes from.
He says, “The education I received was English.
“Sometimes I don’t even know whether what I am thinking or feeling is my own or simply something I acquired as a result of my study of English literature.
“When I started writing, D.H. Lawrence was the skeleton in my cupboard.
“After that it was James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouak, Allen Ginsburg and Charles Bukowsky until I began to doubt the existence of any originality in myself. “And when I came back here from England, it was amazing.
“I could not understand everything Shona-speaking people were saying.
“I took to English as a duck takes to water.”
As if commenting on his colleagues’ religious hypnosis with English values, Musaemura Zimunya observes in his poem Black Pare that: “Some did even repeat the Lord’s Prayer as if they did not see the graft of the white man’s soul inside the black clay.”
Foreign values have indeed settled in our midst and damaged our society and image as Africans.
They are called individual rights; Children’s rights; Fundamental human rights and freedoms; Rights to personal liberty; and Marriage Rights in Chapter Four of our Constitution titled ‘Declarations of Rights’.
The following example helps us appreciate how they work in Africa.
A character in one of Achebe’s works asks his colleague, “Are you going to marry the English way or ask your people to approach her people according to African custom?”
His colleague says, No.
The friend asks again if his colleague had told his parents about the girl he wanted to marry.
The colleague’s answer is, No.
And he goes ahead to marry without his parents’ blessings.
The exercise of Individual Rights brings to mind a Zimbabwean girl who declared in one of the programmes on a Zimbabwean radio station saying eloquently in English to the applause of the audience, that: “It is my body.
“I sleep and have sex with whoever I want.”
The idea that a person has a right to do whatever she wants with her body, again, brings to mind another aberration practised by African and Zimbabwean youths nowadays.
They wear tattoos anywhere on their bodies.
Some wear tongue-rings, navel-rings, eyebrow-rings, and lower and upper lip-rings.
Ngugi gives another example of Africans who turn to Christianity and sing: “Wash me Redeemer and I shall be whiter than snow.
“If God is slow to respond, there are always hot combs, lipsticks, and snow-fire and ambi to help them on the spiritual journey to whiteness and black-death.”
The tragedy that the Zimbabwean Constitution invites upon African people is of great concern to all of us, first as Africans and particularly as Zimbabweans.
The Praise Singer in Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka reminds us that:
“There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel.
“There is only one home to the life of a tortoise.
“There is only one shell to the soul of a man.
“There is only one world to the spirit of our race.
“If that world leaves its course and smashes on the boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?”
The King’s reply is: “It did not in the time of my forebears.
“It shall not in mine.”
That is the stance we must all take as patriotic Zimbabweans and Africans.