By Shepherd Manhambara

ON October 21 2013 South African President Jacob Zuma made some remarks at the University of Witwatersrand, whose resonance has reverberated across the African continent and beyond.
In an attempt to justify his approval of e-tolls in Johannesburg before an unenthusiastic audience he said: “We can’t think like Africans in Africa generally, we’re in Johannesburg….the freeway between Johannesburg and Pretoria is not some national road in Malawi….”
These remarks left most Africans baffled with disbelief.
Here was the president of a country with the most powerful economy on the continent urging his fellow South Africans not to think like Africans when he is an African himself.
Most Africans were stunned Zuma said those words especially when he spent so many years on Robben Island fighting against apartheid.
The temptation to dismiss Zuma’s statement was overwhelming yet there was something revelatory about the statement.
Yet by talking about Africans in the derogatory manner he did, he had invited the wrath of a whole continent.
First, the statement by Zuma implies that the province of Gauteng in which Johannesburg is located has managed ‘to build a lot of new highways with eight to 10 lanes, costing more than 20 billion Rands’ because those who made such decisions and implemented them had successfully overcome the tragedy to think like Africans.
In this context the African mindset itself is cast as an obstacle to progress, something that has to be overcome if progress is to be made in Africa.
Put in other words, African minds and thoughts are by their very nature inhibitive and allergic to the kind of progress that Zuma has in mind and which Johannesburg has achieved.
Second, by openly urging his audience not to think like Africans, the president has swallowed hook, line and sinker the essentialist arguments by Western colonialists, missionaries, educationists and anthropologists who descended upon Africa like vultures and worked day and night intending to wipe out the African world view, which they regarded as primitive and an obstacle to achieving modernity in Africa.
What kind of progress is it which demands that Africans either reject or maim themselves first before they can be its beneficiaries?
The Japanese, Indians and Chinese have made phenomenal progress without doing much injury to their identity; why should we do on condition we don’t think like Africans?
Third, closely related to the second point is the assumption that for Africans to develop, they have to do so outside their mental universe; in other words, Africans have to discard their culture first before progress can take place.
This assumption which amounts to racial prejudice is rooted in colonialism and has been inherited and internalised by African elites all over Africa.
It is easy to blame President Zuma for his utterances, but most of us are also guilty of this kind of thinking.
However, we need to remind ourselves that it is the African culture that gave birth to the classical civilisation of Egypt and the Sudan; the same African culture which produced astonishing achievements associated with Mapungubwe and the Great Zimbabwe.
The same culture gave birth and nursed the universities of Timbuktu well before the Anglo-Saxons developed their own.
Fourth, all those buildings in Johannesburg are a product of African sweat, every one of them, from brick to mortar and all else.
The cars, trains, buses, trucks, the highways and roads symbolise African resources and wealth coming from diamonds, gold, platinum, coal.
Without the abundant African resources dug up from the deep bowels of the earth by black miners, Johannesburg would not be the mega city that Zuma boasts about today.
Why should an African president seek to distance Africans from the fruit of their labour and resources by unwittingly giving credit to others who are not Africans?
Europeans came to Southern Africa as desperate fortune seekers.
A well documented example is that of Cecil John Rhodes, an ailing pauper from England whose health and material fortunes shot up the moment he set his foot on South African soil.
Fifth, it is easy to distance ourselves from Zuma’s utterances and make-believe he did not say what he said and go on living our lives as if nothing has happened.
However, we should attempt to connect Zuma, the freedom fighter that we know him to be to his advice that South Africans should not think like Africans.
The fact is not all members of movements in Southern Africa that fought against white oppression are revolutionary.
This is a challenge that Southern Africa faces.
However, I take pride in that when Steve Biko died on September 12 1977, and Chris Hani on April 10 1993 and Oliver Tambo on April 24 1993—all of them believed Africans had the great capacity to liberate themselves and take their countries to great heights of development. And Thabo Mbeki confirms this sentiment in his famous speech: ‘I am an African’.