HomeOld_PostsRe-asserting the African identity: Fighting for survival

Re-asserting the African identity: Fighting for survival

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LAST week I visited a local supermarket to pick some groceries.
My six-year-old niece came along and quickly dashed to the section with children’s toys.
She picked a white doll and excitedly displayed it before me.
She wanted me to buy it for her.
I exclaimed, “Oh no, not a white doll! Do they not have black ones?”
To my great disappointment they did not have black dolls.
My niece felt the white doll was ‘just great’.
I explained she must get a doll that looks like herself, a black doll.
We argued a bit and my niece eventually gave up on buying the white doll.
This incident got me thinking about our African tragedy where generally we do not believe in ourselves.
Some have referred to this condition as ‘self-hate’.
King Leopold II instructed missionaries going to Africa to teach Africans to hate wealth and embrace poverty, to hate themselves and their culture.
After all, the Bible says: ‘Blessed are the poor…’.
What methods have been used to alienate the Africans from themselves?
The Western Christian Church has had the most devastating impact in terms of destroying African identity and disconnecting Africans from their roots, their culture and their religion.
Heads of African families called on to lead in various ceremonies refuse claiming: ‘Ini ndinonamata’ (I am a Christian/worshipper). Traditional cultural practices have been abandoned by Africans who have been lured into Western churches that denigrate African culture and values, preaching individualism and belief in a white God!
So what happens to African children who grow up playing with white dolls?
Toys are part of how a people pass on or teach their culture to the younger generations who are the adults of tomorrow.
We Africans seem to aspire to be Europeans.
I am amazed at the European football frenzy on our local radio stations.
People in the villages, in local townships and cities are exposed to details of English and European club football.
One may be excused for thinking these stations are in Europe.
The effect is to alienate our population from local African events and to endear them to foreign white teams and soccer heroes.
Children in Chitungwiza and Makokoba grow up rooting for English clubs and admiring European footballers.
When will they identify with African sports heroes?
You would have thought that we would use our media in Zimbabwe and Africa to build and sustain strong African brands in our different spheres of activity.
That is how we create a generation that is ‘proud to be African’.
By marginalising our local languages, we ensure that our growing generations will continue to believe their languages and cultures are inferior to those of Europeans.
This condemns Africans to a perpetual inferiority complex.
The independent Africans have continued to perpetuate their own marginalisation by failing to defend their own African identity.
Local content in the media is critical for building our African image. The danger is when local content has no pan-African ideological focus.
Western-educated technocrats who despise their African background will seek to create mini-European institutions in their African countries.
These institutions are accessible to the educated minority.
The rest of the population continue to regret their circumstances and to wish they were like the Europeans.
But Africans need to stand up and be themselves and take their rightful place in the global village.
They must have an identity that goes beyond the colour of their skin because that colour can be changed.
The case of Africans whitening their skin colour offers a sad commentary on black people denying their identity.
As we grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, many black women were obsessed with the desire to have white skin.
It was as if they regretted being born black.
A skin preparation called ‘Ambi Special’ was used to lighten the skins of black women.
The preparation contained chemicals that destroyed the skin cells that make ‘melanin’, the material that gives Africans their dark pigmentation.
The dark pigment in African skin is an adaptation to the excessive sunlight found in the African environment.
Those who applied Ambi Special gradually lost their dark pigment, the melanin.
Their skins became light like that of white people from Europe.
After a few months looking like white people (varungu), and I guess cherishing every moment of whiteness, things turned horribly wrong. Despite further applications of skin lightener, the skin turned purple then dark, giving a burnt appearance.
The skin became rough and looked really ugly.
I remember attending a wedding ceremony in Vuti Purchase Lands in Hurungwe District.
When the bride arrived, local women and children started chiding her by singing about her Ambi-scotched skin.
They sang a jiti song with the lyrics:
“Wakanotitorera gudo rina mavara;
Rinozora Ambi Special” (You brought us a baboon, which dons skin-lightening Ambi Special).
The bride burst into tears.
The crowd was just teasing her but their message was clear: We do not approve of your skin-lightening antics.
Michael Jackson, the famous singer, was born into a black Afro-American family, descendants of African slaves shipped in shackles to America.
He grew up singing with his brothers and sisters.
He later caught the bug of self-denial.
He could not put up with the reality that he was an African with a black skin, black kinky hair and thick lips.
Jackson used the money that he made from singing to turn himself into a ‘white person’.
He had expensive plastic surgery to straighten his nose, narrow his lips and give himself a Caucasian (European) face.
The hair was easy, he used various wigs and hair extensions.
Changing his skin from black to white was his greatest challenge.
He used various skin lightening chemicals and swallowed different pills to suppress his black genes so he could become white.
Like our black Ambi African girls, Michael’s experiments to change nature failed.
He got horribly discoloured and eventually died looking like a white caricature.
Many of his younger fans can be forgiven for believing that he was white.
His reconstructed facial features were those of a white person.
As if all this was not enough, Jackson got himself a white woman for a wife and hired a surrogate mother to bear white (coloured?) children for him.
I have nothing against Jackson, but given his fame, he is an excellent example of how far black people have gone to deny their identity.
And so we must continue to explore the basis for self-denial by Africans.
We know King Leopold II instructed missionaries to find ways to make Africans hate themselves and their culture.
By dispossessing and impoverishing them, whites induced blacks to hate themselves as they had become synonymous with poverty.
The deprivation was near absolute and many Africans just prayed to God to turn them into whites who had all these privileges.
In Rhodesia, the black population identified all the wonderful things of life with white people: money, cars, good food, wine, houses and beautiful clothes, among others.
The white skin became associated with privilege, privileges acquired by hook and crook as well as sheer brutal force and suppression.
Indeed in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, whites were at the top of the social, political and economic ladder followed by the Indians and coloureds whose skins were light.
The latter two groups enjoyed more privileges than the poor blacks at the bottom of the social pile.
Many blacks using Ambi and other skin-lightening preparations, turned themselves into coloureds, earning themselves more privileges than their black brothers.
One must wonder how powerful these social incentives were to drive black people to hate not only their circumstances, but also their personal selves.
Mimicking whites was an easier way to satisfy this ego to be like a white person.
Speaking the whiteman’s language, donning his clothes, putting on wigs with flowing hair (for the black women), eating with fork and knife, drinking European beer and a host of other lifestyle issues dominated the black person’s existence.
Some have claimed this overwhelming desire to mimick whites completely isolated the blacks from pursuing their own development agenda.
Of course the whites were ruling and calling the shots.
For many blacks there was no choice.
After all the sjambok was used extensively to whip Africans into line, to make them compliant.
So you wonder at the wide range of physical and mental inducements on the blackman to abandon his own way of life, language and culture to ‘follow’ the whiteman’s!
Let us explore these in future episodes.

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