Africa Should Purge Its Past
Writes: James N Kariuki
Over the past few weeks, The Sunday Standard has been focusing on Africans, her history, impacts and the way forward.
Of major concern has been whether the continent has looked past slavery and colonisation.
The Black Holocaust is one of the more underreported events. It makes reference to the millions of African lives that have been lost during the centuries to slavery, colonisation and oppression.
The Black Holocaust makes reference to the horrors endured by millions of men, women, and children throughout the African Diaspora. In sheer numbers, depth and brutality, it is a testimony to the worst elements of human behaviour and the strongest elements of survival.
Some people are of the view that Africans themselves have contributed greatly to their subjugation.
It all started with their collaboration with the slave traders — assisting in the capture and sale of their kindred into slavery. In the US today, an African-American will in fury stand eyeball-to-eyeball with an African and charge: “You sold us.”
Similarly, post-colonial African elite has been guilty of robbing their fellows. Billions of dollars of public funds have disappeared between the cracks into foreign banks.
Best African ‘kleptocrats’ have included Zaire’s (DRC) Mobutu Sese Seko, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba and others. Now, Kenyans hope the billion of shillings stuffed abroad will be returned.
Hence the biting subtitle of Nigeria writer Prof. Rothenberg Chinweizu’s book: The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite.
Chinweizu shows how leaders who meet the West’s needs are rewarded through debt forgiveness, occasional state visits to the White House, honorary degrees from Western institutions, Western leaders’ visits to their countries and military support.
A ‘new brand of African leaders’
In this spirit, in 1998, during former American president Bill Clinton’s visit to Africa, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s strongman Paul Kagame were hailed as a ‘new brand of African leaders‘.
Some concerns have been raised over the role of these ‘new leaders’ in the Congo crisis.
Given this background, one school of thought among the reparations campaigners does not subscribe to restitution for Africa so much in material compensation. If reparations were paid out today, it would merely be a cycle. The money would find its way back to foreign banks. Therefore remedy must include changing the world order such that another holocaust shall never again be visited upon the African people.
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The first critical step towards genuine reparations is fundamental rehabilitation of the Africans’ ‘attitude of mind’. Slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism have left deep scars in our psyche: a sense of inferiority complex, self-contempt and worshiping things Western. We are part of what Caribbean writer, Frantz Fanon, describes in his book Black Skin, White Masks.
This book was a personal account of Fanon’s experience of being a black man, an intellectual with a French education rejected in France by the French because of his skin colour.
In the book, he defines the colonial relationship as the psychological non-recognition of the subjectivity of the colonised.
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Meanwhile, the prevailing world order has inculcated upon mankind a profound sense of Negrophobia.
Inevitably, we must work on cleansing our own psyche with a view to ultimately establishing a world order in which the Black skin is no longer a badge of contempt. We shouldâ??as Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o puts itâ??decolonise our minds.
Kenya has made significant strides in transforming ‘Africanness’ into a source of pride.
However, despite all the efforts we have fallen short because we are unwitting products of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism; we are victims of the African Holocaust.
To create a new world order where another Black Holocaust will never recur we need to be freed, purged of our past. One cannot make free people out of slaves; they must first be cleansed of slave mentality.
References:
1. Get Africa’s History Out of Explorers’ Diaries
2. On Negrophobia: Psychoneurotic Obstacles to Black Autonomy (or Why I just love Michael Jackson) — By Chinweizu, A Sundoor Publication, P. 0. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria. — | NegoroPhobia PIC — Courtesy: africawithin.com |
3. Decolonising the African mind
4. Germany’s Black Holocaust, 1890-1945: The Untold Truth!
7. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
8. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature
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