African Spotlight Spotlighting Africans at Home and Abroad
They call the Third World the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous prefecture. In this realm people are sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and therefore indigent—totally penniless, needy, destitute, poverty-stricken, disfavored, and impoverished. In this demesne, as they call it, there are hardly any discoveries, inventions, and innovations. Africa is the trailblazer. Some still call it “the dark continent” for the light that flickers under the tunnel is not that of hope, but an approaching train. And because countless keep waiting in the way of the train, millions die and many more remain decapitated by the day.
“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do something about it.”
Brawny, fully bald-headed, with intense, steely eyes, he was as cold as they come. When I first discovered I was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. I associate marble-shaven Caucasians with iconoclastic skin-heads, most of who are racist.
“My name is Walter,” he extended his hand as soon as I settled in my seat.
I told him mine with a precautious smile.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Zambia.”
“Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.”
“But of course,” he responded. “You just elected King Cobra as your president.”
My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.
“I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba, Dr. Siteke Mwale, and many other highly intelligent Zambians.” He lowered his voice. “I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.” He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”
“Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.
“I have since moved to yet another group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will be in Lusaka to hypnotize the cobra. I work for the broker that has acquired a chunk of your debt. Your government owes not the World Bank, but us millions of dollars. We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and fly back with a check twenty times greater.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”
He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and stick.”
Quett Masire’s name popped up.
“Oh, him, well, we never got to him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to do.”
At midnight we were airborne. The captain wished us a happy 2012 and urged us to watch the fireworks across Los Angeles.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” Walter said looking down.
From my middle seat, I took a glance and nodded admirably.
“That’s white man’s country,” he said. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia.”
I grinned. “There is no Lake Zambia.”
He curled his lips into a smug smile. “That’s what we call your country. You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta is crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the Bwana and you are the Muntu. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians, Africans, the entire Third World.”
The smile vanished from my face.
“I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a racist. That’s how most Zambians respond when I tell them the truth. They go ballistic. Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and white crap, aside. Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and me?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits. After they were all done it was clear that 99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the same.”
I gladly nodded.
“And yet I feel superior,” he smiled fatalistically. “Every white person on this plane feels superior to a black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff. Tell me why my angry friend.”
For a moment I was wordless.
“Please don’t blame it on slavery like the African Americans do, or colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatization. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me a better answer.”
I was thinking.
He continued. “Excuse what I am about to say. Please do not take offense.”
I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and prepared for the worst.
“You my friend flying with me and all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I protested.
He was implacable. “Oh yes it is and I will say it again, you are lazy. Poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in the Lusaka markets and on the street selling merchandise. I saw them in villages toiling away. I saw women on Kafue Road crushing stones for sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the Zambian intellectuals? Are the Zambian engineers so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years of independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use? What is the school there for?”
I held my breath.
“Do you know where I found your intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. They were at the Lusaka Golf Club, Lusaka Central Club, Lusaka Playhouse, and Lusaka Flying Club. I saw with my own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates. Zambian intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for brainstorming.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And you flying to Boston and all of you Zambians in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to your country. You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and sisters are in Mtendere, Chawama, and in villages, all of them living in squalor. Many have died or are dying of neglect by you. They are dying of AIDS because you cannot come up with your own cure. You are here calling yourselves graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that—PhD my foot!”
I was deflated.
“Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those research findings and dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”
He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said and grinned. “As long as you are dependent on my plane, I shall feel superior and you my friend shall remain inferior, how about that? The Chinese, Japanese, Indians, even Latinos are a notch better. You Africans are at the bottom of the totem pole.”
He tempered his voice. “Get over this white skin syndrome and begin to feel confident. Become innovative and make your own stuff for god’s sake.”
At 8 a.m. the plane touched down at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Walter reached for my hand.
“I know I was too strong, but I don’t give it a damn. I have been to Zambia and have seen too much poverty.” He pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Here, read this. It was written by a friend.”
He had written only the title: “Lords of Poverty.”
Thunderstruck, I had a sinking feeling. I watched Walter walk through the airport doors to a waiting car. He had left a huge dust devil twirling in my mind, stirring up sad memories of home. I could see Zambia’s literati—the cognoscente, intelligentsia, academics, highbrows, and scholars in the places he had mentioned guzzling and talking irrelevancies. I remembered some who have since passed—how they got the highest grades in mathematics and the sciences and attained the highest education on the planet. They had been to Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), only to leave us with not a single invention or discovery. I knew some by name and drunk with them at the Lusaka Playhouse and Central Sports.
Walter is right. It is true that since independence we have failed to nurture creativity and collective orientations. We as a nation lack a workhorse mentality and behave like 13 million civil servants dependent on a government pay cheque. We believe that development is generated 8-to-5 behind a desk wearing a tie with our degrees hanging on the wall. Such a working environment does not offer the opportunity for fellowship, the excitement of competition, and the spectacle of innovative rituals.
But the intelligentsia is not solely, or even mainly, to blame. The larger failure is due to political circumstances over which they have had little control. The past governments failed to create an environment of possibility that fosters camaraderie, rewards innovative ideas and encourages resilience. KK, Chiluba, Mwanawasa, and Banda embraced orthodox ideas and therefore failed to offer many opportunities for drawing outside the line.
I believe King Cobra’s reset has been cast in the same faculties as those of his predecessors. If today I told him that we can build our own car, he would throw me out.
“Naupena? Fuma apa.” (Are you mad? Get out of here)
Knowing well that King Cobra will not embody innovation at Walter’s level let’s begin to look for a technologically active-positive leader who can succeed him after a term or two. That way we can make our own stone crushers, water filters, water pumps, razor blades, and harvesters. Let’s dream big and make tractors, cars, and planes, or, like Walter said, forever remain inferior.
A fundamental transformation of our country from what is essentially non-innovative to a strategic superior African country requires a bold risk-taking educated leader with a triumphalist attitude and we have one in YOU. Don’t be highly strung and feel insulted by Walter. Take a moment and think about our country. Our journey from 1964 has been marked by tears. It has been an emotionally overwhelming experience. Each one of us has lost a loved one to poverty, hunger, and disease. The number of graves is catching up with the population. It’s time to change our political culture. It’s time for Zambian intellectuals to cultivate an active-positive progressive movement that will change our lives forever. Don’t be afraid or dispirited, rise to the challenge and salvage the remaining few of your beloved ones.
Field Ruwe is a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author. He is a PhD candidate with a B.A. in Mass Communication and Journalism, and an M.A. in History.
This is a clarion call to all Africans, a classical words of inspiration. whatever the mind can conceive, the hand can achieve it. we all Africans have the capacity to achieve greatness, we just need to think big and challenge ourselves irrespective of our socio-economic environment. we always look for excuses for no-performance rather than solutions to our problems. GOD bless Nigeria and Africa as a whole.
The Article is good and provoking. No time to debate over this article. What is needed is to arise and make some strategic intervention to our situation.
Education as Imperialism:
ONE OF THE MOST DAMAGING AND LASTING EFFECTS of colonialism has been the creation in all colonized countries, particularly African ones, of a class of ‘elite’ people who might more appropriately be called the ‘deluded hybrids’. Products of the imposed system of education designed to create a class uprooted from its cultural and moral traditions. The main objective of Western edu¬cation in Africa was partly to train subordinate administrative personnel for employment in the imperial administration, and partly to develop an influential class of persons in African countries who, though African to the extent of their skin color; possessed a Western cul¬tural orientation – language, consumption habits, dress, social morality, ideas about government, economy, class, etc. – and therefore a stake in the continuation of the “Western con¬nection”. People of this type, or with at least elements of the Western outlook, emerged in all African countries under European imperial rule. In many cases they inherited actual political leadership from the Europeans when, on “inde¬pendence”, colonial status gave way to neo colonial status.
It is this influential class who, as politicians and soldiers, has continued to hold the reins of government in cynical and damaging succession in these countries. This development, when considered from its wider political, moral and ideo¬logical perspectives, has had many consequences.
Imperialism led to the acceptance of the myth of Eur¬opean superiority – an essential ingredient of the Euro¬pean educational philosophy – in governmental and intel¬lectual circles in our countries, and consequently to the acceptance of European thought and ideas as possessing uni¬versal validity. For that reason successive governments almost everywhere in Africa, have come to accept European notions of government, economy and social reform as final and immutable. And for that reason, our universities have come to peddle Western ideals – Capitalism, Socialism, democracy and the rest – as the only valid and universal ideals.
The danger is that ideals which are essentially racial and parochial, which have given particular cause for colonialism from which we all suffer and which, moreover, have de¬veloped from strictly European experience and are therefore irrelevant to our own experience are taught at the expense of our heritage and values. It is this widespread acceptance of this myth of the essential superiority of European thought and practice in the field of human affairs which constitutes the most formidable ob¬stacles in the way of extricating contemporary Africa from the corruption into which it is plunged. Even when this alleged universal validity of the European system has proved hollow, as in Nigeria, DR Congo, Angola and Egypt, the deluded hybrids do not even possess the courage to disown it; instead they blame themselves for not being sufficiently loyal to the Western system.
In addition to the fact that the elite in our lands are capable only of playing the part of the slave, ape or puppet in relation to Western imperialism, the nature of their training makes them inherently impotent in serious social crises, and thus socially undesirable to be at the helm of affairs over the people. Most of the modem universities in the West were established purposely to provide training in science and technology for industrial and business establishments, and not to produce scholars who could reform society. In a period of social and moral crisis, such as the one in which the West is plunged at the moment, the result is that reforming influences are remark¬ably lacking and society continues to sink deeper into the moral abyss.
In the face of this terrible corruption of Western society, our men and women of learning have little to say. The things they have studied do not fit them to offer solutions to the multiple problems of human affairs, for their training fits them rather to be instruments of the very developments which cause the crisis. There can be no doubt about it that African society at the present time is facing many of the crises which afflict the West. The fact of Western imperialism and neo colonialism indeed ensures the extension of the Western crises to our countries. The excessive Westernization of our education… ensures in turn that our men/women of learning face these crises with the helplessness – making them incapable of providing relevant long-term solutions.
All that the elite leadership has been able to do in the period of moral crisis, which in some countries has been persistent, is to resort to such self-defeating measures as reliance on force, brutality and ruthlessness to solve what is essentially a human problem. This in itself is an indication of the absence of reason and intelligence in governments, as well as an inability to make moral evaluations to ensure per¬manent solutions.
Another consequence of Western education is its inability to produce men and women of vision, ability and integrity to hold the reins of power. In our universities or military academies, people are given alien models for imitation and in the effort to comply to the norms that are essentially not theirs, the so-called educated elements or ‘intellectuals’ lose their self-respect, and more im-portantly, are turned into weaklings. That is precisely why we have lost nation builders, visionaries and people of ideas who deal with other nations, not as beggars and dwarfs, but as men/women of strength and purpose.
Western education has robbed us of our African identity and produced Africans who have been specially manu¬factured to ensure the continuation of the ‘Western connection’. This Western connection, however, cannot be perpetuated without a severe, impairing cultural influence, where people are brought up under the blighting influence of tribalism, and under the guidance of a literature in which it has been the fashion to caricature the African, to ridicule his personal peculiarities and to impress him with a sense of perpetual and hopeless inferiority.
The last consequence of colonial education is the virtual substitution of Spirituality, Ethics and Morality with crude and brutal power as the object of reliance and trust, which has resulted in a new kind of self¬-imperialism. The Westernized elite, being uprooted from their culture, have come to view with a most profound awe Western powers and their vast array of weaponry and daz-zling technological achievement; hence, they submit to West¬ern interests, even before they are told to do so. This is also the reason why, even when Western ideas are being ques¬tioned in the West, our men in government and universities still dread questioning what the white man believes.
The reason why the traditions of learning which these [West¬ern] institutions represent, in spite of the way in which they run counter to the grain of human intellectual history are so often unquestionably accepted by African intellectuals is no doubt due to the enormous material power they’ve generated in the West, and which it is often hoped will be similarly generated here in Africa.
The acceptance of secularism as a philosophy of education has meant that the things that matter considerably in national life – politics, the economy, social morality – are deprived of their spiritual content and are, therefore, ultimately trivialized. Politics, we are told, is not a responsibility with far-reaching and profound conse¬quences, but as it is often said ‘a dirty game’. Should anyone wonder then that the whole life in so many African countries has been polluted by politics of dirt and vulgarity?
The object of secularism is precisely to vulgarize people’s attitudes not only to Spirituality, Ethics, and Morality but to every aspect of life, becoming a decisive force in the shaping of the destiny of nations. It is borne out of human arrogance which promotes the notion that God does not matter, that spirituality is not relevant in the organization of human life. In the process of banishing spirituality, however, many other things are desecrated: human life, human freedom, social organization, politics, knowledge and even religion itself. All these have become cheap commodities, subjected not to higher values but to the whims of those who rule. In fact it is the lack of a definite commitment to our African values that has been the bane of our Continent.
The absence of the influence of spiritual values in determining the course of the nation means that the decisive spiritual and social steps that need to be taken to correct the national ills will never be taken. The belief seems to be that human conduct can be changed by force, but not through a moral transformation, persuasion, education, inspiration or personal example. When we con¬sider that secularism is a system imposed by our experience as a colonized people, then we have to accept that it has to be abandoned as a necessary first step in any attempt to bring about a social transformation of society. Among other things, this requires two basic steps.
First, we must oust the hegemony of secular western thought in our universities and institutions of learning, and bring our African spiritual values to bear into all fields of endeavour. The present system of education not only ensures that corruption is provided with a sound technological base, but its sole object, is to train people in how to make money and to achieve a sound exploitative relationship with one’s fellow men. We must minimize the peddling of secular thought – be it in the form of liberal capitalist philosophy or Socialist doctrine – so as to arrest the drift to corruption and social decay in so many African countries.
Secondly, since the secular approach to social transformation is ineffective and, in most cases, deceptive, Africans, and most especially African scholars and intel¬lectuals, now have the responsibility to move to the forefront in the struggle to save our countries from their present servile and cringing attitude and establish the spiritual and moral basis for genuine change. The magic of secular thought is gone and its days of absolute predominance are over.
As African intellectuals; this decaying liberalism and this strong materialistic individualism are not natural; they have been forced on us in recent times. Moreover, they run sharply counter to the grain of the African cultural heritage. If we want a strong social morality which will carry us forward in development, we do not have to bring it from the other side of the world, from countries we do not know and people we do not properly understand. We can find it here: in the abandoned and forgotten traditions of the cultural heritage of our Continent.
I will end this singing and saying:
Nkosi, sikelel’ iAfrika – God bless Africa
In English:
Lord, bless Africa
May her horn rise high up
Hear Thou our prayers And bless us…
In Xhosa:
Nkosi, sikelel’ iAfrika
Maluphakamis’upondo lwayo
Yizwa imithandazo yethu
Nkosi sikelela, Thina lusapholwayo…
It is time to arise and grasp the blessings of God on the African continent. Africa is blessed and every day we see fresh evidence. Our goal as Africans should be to showcase some of these stories and encourage Africans to look around them and see the efforts people are making to bring change, and to join in on these efforts until it becomes the predominant trend. Then we will see the fullness of our expected restoration.
is it true what the white man is saying? well if it’s true that what they are enjoying
was through ther hard working,there inovations,inventions,and etc,why is it that your countries have joined the arabs in demonstrations,your being called the ANTI WALL
STREET,why is that you are beging the Chines and the Arabs to get you economy from the limbo it is in.Is that you are no more inovative,are you lazy.have you eroded all you brains that you cant think any more.
We should not try and reason with idiots who come here to rip our people of their resources and later become judges that we were fools. That kind of defence is like a criminal that robbed you, the guy worked for the IMF and ripped off the Zambian government by his own admission, saying that you are a fool that is why he robbed you. The criminal robs because it is in his nature to make others suffer, he enjoys it and lives off the blood and toil of others. He cannot therefore stand in judgement. He can see himself as superior but that is just a figment of his imagination. Let them leave us alone, we do not need anything from them, contrary to what they say and what our stupid governments believe. The bedrock of our nations is in our self sufficiency and satisfaction with what we have not in the greed of the rat race which leads into a life lived in a hurry without meaning. Life is not about invention and innovation, it is about simplicity and happiness. It also is not about living longer but about how we have lived life. Ethics and integrity are at the core of everything. They say happiness comes from a life well lived, Caucasians hold on to inventions and innovation as if they are the only ones that invented things and there is no contribution in those invention from the rest of the world. They are the biggest scam known to man. As they claim that the Asians stole from them, they in the first place stole from the Asian civilisation. Eg. The stole the wheel barrow, formal education and gun powder (fire works) from China. They stole tertiary education and cities from the Africans in Mali and Egypt. Like Pieter Mulder, they now want to rewrite history with their destructive so called civilisation as the greatest human feat. No, they will not fool me; they are criminals and thieves. They are lazy to make their countries work and leech on the rest of the world. I’m sorry my mama gave birth to no fool.
Anyone feels offended on what this Whiteman wrote is very foolish. I wish many White People tell us openly so that we can drop “The whites colonized and rob us” Did they told you not to think too.
I do not think disagreeing would be “foolish” as put forward by @Lyangurungunda. It is true that they did rob us! But we must not use that as an excuse to not progress. We should avoid finger pointing because it wont lead to any productivity…The insult is in denying that these events had an affect on how Africa is today,and i suppose the laziness is in our slowness to move away fromt he shadow they lef on us.
The key point that the article missed out is the context of Africa, in my opinion. Change is happening in parts of Africa and the intellectuals are the leading the way. In order for intellectuals to be able to pass on knowledge there needs to be room for a dialogue between them and the people. This could be achieved through adapting our schooling so as to allow innovation and inspire the youth to be creative. ‘Education Reform’, is the key to success in Africa, but this necessarily requires political action, which is difficult to begin amidst all the ‘corruption, anarchy and constant abuse of human rights’. Development requires a good foundation.
By saying it is all down to the lazy intellectuals you are assinging blame, which obfuscates from what we should be doing namely, analysing the african situation in search for solutions.
African intellectuals failed to lead or to transfer their knowledge to our communities due to many reasons, such as selfishness and lack of national or regional development vision to name a few. Within the last 30 years, China merges as a globlal leader, and India to follow soon, while most of African countires are occpied by wars within themselves and killing their own people as in Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. Africans graduated from all over the world, but what they have done to their own communities? Most African countries do not have infrasturcture, clean drinking water, lack of power in most countries, and do not ask about health and education for the coming generations.And still blaming others?
It’s not about the natural resources and not about the white man either, it’s about ourselves.
You put forward an astute response @S YaHya to the article and one which I find myself in agreement with. Nevertheless I would add that, it is not an issue of “blaming others”, in asking us to consider the past and what affects it has had, we are doing so in order to illuminate what has made the current porous situation possible. When I referred to slavery and colonialism it was not to assign blame, but rather to acknowledge that these are important events in our history and they should not be trivialised. In any case I do believe that, similar to the western nations, we too as a continent will have success…but it is important to understand that this necessarily takes time. Remember the old adage ‘good things come to those who wait?’… Well this is true of Africa I believe we are going through the growing pains (I add emphasis here). The waiting I am referring to is not that of a stagnant nature, rather that of experimenting with ideas that will eventually lead to a better Africa.
Whilst I am an optimist and, one might say over-exuberant one at that, I am also a realist, which allows me to rebuke the ‘lazy intellectuals’(although I do not resolve all the blame for them) but to also look at the context in which their being asked to develop. In any case @S Yahya raise’s good points about the difficulty of development in a context such as Africa. In the end we see that to dismiss Africa’s lack of development on the grounds of ‘lazy intellectuals’, is ignoring the particularities of how the African continent is.
(Apologies for any grammatical or spelling errors I responded in haste)
This article is insulting if read literally, and if we consider the undertone of it, the words nonsense, minimalistic, reductionist and re-writing history come to mind. Whilst it is all well and good to recognise that Africans need to be more creative in commerce, the author does not consider some of the more fundamental issues concerning Africa’s conflicted past, namely (even though we urged to ignore it) the impact of slavery and colonialism. These events have not only shaped or current existence, but are the cause of the situation we are in. Invention and creativity require an environment that is conducive to it (i.e. investments and a willing consumer market, both of which are not seen in any great number in Africa).
Let’s not kid ourselves by stating that the western superiority is not based on the past atrocities! The western world’s dominance is proliferated by our trying to be like them, in how we live as Africans! Our intelligentsia needs to engage in the African experience as motivation for success, as opposed to comparing ourselves with the west. If we forever aim to be like the west and hold them as paradigm of success of existence, we will fail to recognise what is unique about ourselves. (Whilst borrowing from the west is not overtly undesirable, we should do so is as much as it facilitates the African experience.) Moreover the western world, regardless of how much one denies it, owes its current position to the trepidations of the past. Whilst it is pointless to advocate that Africa should resist the western way of being that was imposed on it, I still hold strongly that we should define our being in terms and standards more closely linked to our own agenda ( whatever that maybe).
Ask yourselves why should we ignore Slavery, Colonialism, and the ongoing repression we suffer? Are these not instruments of history that have shaped the world in a significant way? Consider this: Words only make sense in reference to other words, and new words are created in the basis of old words, thus, no word can exist outside of the language if it does not have a reference point! Similarly, the historical events have shaped our current situation; we cannot understand Africa by ignoring these events or pretending that they never had an effect. Crucially, engaging with what these events have done might give us a better method of how to resolve the poverty and plight they left.
The article is illuminating inasmuch as it acts as a rallying call to the masses to engage in African ingenuity, however calling African’s “Lazy” (emphasis added), is not in keeping with the sensitive approach that is required, in light of the abuse that our continent has suffered. The west used slavery and colonialism as a platform for their improvement and in recognition on this fact they should aid the African continent to the new way of life they have introduced to us. Any momentous change will not occur over-night, 30 years of independence is not enough to build a functioning society, more time is needed.
(Please Excuse any spelling or grammatical errors, I wrote this response in haste)
Africans need to learn there history! This is ignorant at best! You see he never asked the white man “Why did white people came to Africa in the first place” What that white man just did was what his Great-grandfathers did to the African chiefs . Carthaginians white? You could tell by the way the “White Man” refer to slavery as just an excuse for Africans!
You wanted the Whiteman to be asked why his grandfathers came to Africa. Do you know that they were invited by our kings and chiefs? Your own people sold sold your forefathers and grandmothers. How many Whites did your own people bought from Europe? I really like what this Whiteman said, because all what we know is killing our own people.
A powerful and insightful revelation. It intrigues.
Heart toching it is. A must read for all african intellectuals. Hope to read more of this kind; it helps in activating the ‘will power’ of the present generation of african countries. YES……..WE CAN