The world’s most powerful man is Black/mixed race and African. This shows that as a people we have a huge amount of potential that is still yet to be tapped. However African leaders do not invest in their people. When one thinks about the fact that people as social capital have the ability to contribute to our economies throughout their lives, almost, with continuous personal development and upgrading of their skills, we can see that actually they lack intelligence and cleverness as well as foresight. If our elite are also joining the bandwagon of get rich quick money-making ventures, then one has to wonder where their intelligence lies as well!
The fact that we are so divided has meant that the West has been able to seize this as a tool of exploitation and enrichment. One will also find that many Black people are still being subjected to modern-day slavery, experimentation by Western drug and pharmaceutical companies, being subject to organ harvesting and global dumping by the Developed and now Developing countries of Asia.
Many African countries don’t seem to realise that they are in fact playing with fire! The house is burning, yet we pander with petty rivalries, we submit to greed, ethnic tensions and religious tensions, divisiveness, corruption, short sightedness, yet fail to realise that we are all in this together, no one sees Ewe, Ashanti, Fulani or Zulu, Yoruba, they see Black.
Our collective human experience as a race is so grave, serious and tragic in our recent history, that this experience should unite us and cause us to take collective action, as other oppressed peoples have done throughout history and in more recent times. If this can’t, then nothing can! This is where the tragedy lies. We are silent when we see corruption and rather than condemn it, many jump onto the bandwagon of get rich quick politics and schemes.
We invite corrupt and morally bankrupt people to our parties and open our doors and arms to those who murder in cold blood. Make no mistake, if Africa fails to catch up and sit up, we will find ourselves as a collective, back to the dark days of slavery in one form or another! Some would argue that that is only a matter of time.
Change starts with our collective thinking
Change starts with our collective thinking. Education needs to be adjusted to our African experience past and present, our culture and history and applied most importantly to new experiences and situations and not just education for its own sake, as Chinweizu states in his book: Decolonizing The African Mind.
Where substandard half-baked students are churned out of academic institutions with no scope for self-improvement talk, less of the improvement of others. Many Africans who are educated, are proud to say that they are a doctor, lawyer, and engineer, have a masters, a doctorate and so on, and yet fail to apply their education to their own unique traditions, history, culture or experiences.
They prefer instead to turn to Western prescriptions to solve their problems, to Western or Arab Religions and denying our own African unique traditional achievements in the Sciences, Medicine, Religion and technology etc, which should be built on and updated. If one cannot apply one’s education to one’s own unique culture, tradition and experiences and continuously update them throughout life, then their education has been mostly useless. It serves no other purpose than to enrich some other race, as we are seeing today.
Violence, corruption, ruthlessness and greed, which is pervasive throughout the continent, is a sign of extreme weakness! Many people mistake this attribute of mankind, as strength, but of course it isn’t. They think that they’re clever when they pay lip service to uplifting the poor. They are monsters who in the end are harming themselves! Money doesn’t last forever. The global recession is a case in point. People around the world have lost billions, to it. Our leaders and elite don’t seem to realise that we are all in this together, if we harm each other, in the end we all suffer. It could be in their own life.
There is nothing wrong with ambition. However if it becomes unbridled, then it destroys the person. If we allow the dark side of ourselves to thrive, then in the end everyone suffers, including those children that we hold dear, this is true everywhere. We need to change our collective mindset.
As Chinweizu stated, we need to decolonise our minds, only then can the Africa hope to arise from the learned helpless state it is in at present. As he said “The main objective of decolonising the African mind is to overthrow the authority that alien traditions exercise over the African” This starts with our collective thinking, this is the starting point for all change.