Emmanuel A.M Sam I must extend my profound thanks and appreciation to the entire executive of the AAYC for bestowing such confidence in me to present a paper on this topic: “POST-COLONIAL MODERNITY, THE ILL THOUGHTS THAT SURROUND THE AFRICAN CONTINENT AND THE DECOLONIZATION PROCESS”. Although I was extemporaneously chosen when the dice was cast, I have done my little best. I’m part of the history which presupposes me being in a better position to analyzing it. I’m grateful for the opportunity, it reminds and reaffirms us all that our future will be defined by we the young people craving for a change. Funnily, my history lecturer happens to be in the audience, sir, I shall be discussing history and politics and nothing to do with my legal background. I believe we are all filled with the same desires, hopes and dreams, I doff my hat to you sir. Let me start up by giving a laconic buff/history of the topic itself. Less than five decades ago most of the African and Asian people were colonial subjects, dominated politically, exploited economically and segregated and humiliated by foreign powers. East Africa was divided among the European powers i.e. Britain and Germany. The British took up Uganda and Kenya which was the northern part of East Africa and Germany took Tanganyika which was the southern part of East Africa. I’m with the firmest of convictions that such scramble for Africa by the European powers contributed to the circle in which we are held today by these same powers. Most states in Africa lost their independence without their volition. The East African states lost their independence and were subjected to European rule and administration e.g. Kenya and Uganda were in the hands of the British while Tanzania was controlled by the Germans. Many African chiefs or kings were killed or sent into exile. In East Africa for example Kabalega and Mwanga were exiled while chief Mkwawa of the Hehe was beheaded for resisting German colonial rule in Tanganyika. While West Africa was divided between Britain and France. In my country, Sierra Leone, the indirect rule system that was instituted by Britain was resisted by Bai Bureh in what the British called an insurgent which I have always called a genuine resistance to bad colonial policies and rule. Bai Bureh was captured and treated as a political prisoner. The British sent Bai Bureh in exile to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), along with the powerful Sherbro chief Kpana Lewis and the powerful Mende chief Nyagua I stand here today with mixed-feelings but yet with great hope that Africa will soon be free from the shackles of its colonial prejudices. Africa is known as one of the richest of the seven continents when it comes to natural resources, yet it is the poorest continent. Despite the natural wealth and the aid flow African is still regarded as the poorest and still in serious Ecological Debt. The term ecological debt refers to the debt accumulated by rich countries toward developing nations on account of resource exploitation, which often leads to environmental problems such as air and water pollution. The ecological debt caused by natural resource exploitation keeps the continent down, prevents the region from breaking out of the circle of poverty, and triggers the need for more aid. The dependency approach is now widely used in analyzing Third World developmental problems. Basically, the metropolitan countries block African development by co-opting African leaders into an international social structure that serves the world capitalist economy. By training and conditioning the upper layer of African society into Western habits of consumption, reading, vacation, style, and other European values, the dominant politico-economic system removes the need for direct intervention and indirect colonial rule; the more the new elites develop, the more their expectations rise, the more they become programmed to look North, to think Western, and to alienate themselves from their national society, which is locked into its underdevelopment. I stand to be challenged if my facts appear to you hypothetical. In the colonial era, the Africans were regarded as an inferior group and were forced to provide labour for European plantations and other public works. And that feeling is still fresh in the minds of many westerners outside the African continent. Africa is referred to as the jungle, the woods, where people live with animals. I had met and discussed with a few people in the West who usually ask me about the Lions, Leopards, snakes etc. In the West, when plays are staged about Africa, the themes always centered on the wild animals and depravity. Such myopic and monofocal lenses steamed back from the days of Herodotus who the west called father of History. He once opined that Africa was not only different, but also more threatening, sinister and dangerous than Greece. Subsequent generations of European writers followed suit, substituting fantasy for fact in markedly antagonistic ways. Europeans created an image of Africa that was the perverse opposite of Europe’s, its mirror image. Europe’s general superiority would, by comparison with and in contrast to this image, be self-evident. Europe’s own idea of itself was thus predicated on its image of Africa and other ‘backward’ regions like Asia. But suddenly Asia has for a long time now stood up to such rhetoric and they are among the competing continents for superiority today. But we Africans are still following the West and we are constantly made henchmen to their development. They have used two key tools to create wrong mental picture in the minds of their listener or reader. The first is the western media (both print and electronic). A lot of people in the west believe whatever the media displays as a gospel truth. Few people in the west realize that even their authentic channels of information, the press, books etc do not give them objective and unbiased truth. Few people sometimes take an objective stance to discern the true from the false, the fact from the fiction. Their minds are constantly invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts. One of the greatest needs of such people is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda about the African continent. With insidious zeal, they make inflammatory statements and disseminate distortive and half-truths which arouse abnormal fears and morbid antipathies within the minds of uneducated and underprivileged Africans that were born in the west with great fear of even paying visit to their natural home, fear of not killing or be killed. Aliko Dangote for example, is the richest man on the African continent and the 23rd richest man in the world according to Forbes Magazine. This cannot be publicized around the world but rather the diseases in Africa, the malnourish children, slummy areas and not beautiful cities in Africa. They portray the best parts of the west in the media to appear like there are no slummy places in the west, no ghettos, but I can say it with youthful elasticity that there are more slummy areas and homelessness in the west than Africa. Funchal the capital of an island off the coast of North Africa, is among the most beautiful cities in the world according to 2014 rating, the city unfolds over a series of steep hills, and enjoys one of the most beautiful coastal settings of any city in the world but this cannot be found in the western magazines but rather the jungles of Africa, a place where tropical diseases are most prevalent. Cape Town is regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but when they make mention of Cape Town they want to ascribe its development to the western influence. In fact, to some people who know little about their own history but want to determine other people’s history usually see Africa not as a continent but rather a country, which shows the logic of the western civilization and the imperfection of such logic. They inject self-defeating qualities in the minds of sons and daughters of the continent so much that they are fearful of coming back home and be knocked by the diseases and wars. The most intractable evils of our world, which I called the triple evils of poverty, disease and war are always associated with the African continent. Another tool at the forefront of propagating such to the rest of the world is the activities of non-profit organizations/NGOs. These organizations always present Africa as the continent of poverty, disease. They deliberately espoused such to appeal to their donors. These organizations present the picture in Africa that they are there to extricate us from the shackles of poverty and disease. Sadly, a lot of African leaders see them as the saviors of our continent and some take it as fate, we are at their mercy. Why should Africans accept fatalistic philosophy, which stipulates that whatever happens must happen and that all events are determined by necessity? Fatalism implies that everything in foreordained and inescapable which is what they have convinced us to believe. I know that in these turbulent days of uncertainty the evils of war and of diseases and of economic injustice threaten the very survival of Africans but is that the only picture that should be carved about the African continent? Crowd pressures have unconsciously conditioned our minds and feet to move to the rhythmic drumbeat of the status quo. Even some African intellectuals persuade us of the need to conform. Many political scientists and historians have proffered their own individual solutions to these challenges. For Dipesh Chakraborty he says “let us provincialize Europe”, he says let us treat Europe as province, to him Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference have become a focal point of the ongoing debate on how to approach and write post-colonial history. In his work, PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE, Chakraborty emphasizes the historians need to acknowledge the contradiction between the post-colonial experience and the persistence of Western categories in scholarly explanations of post-colonial modernity. He believes that European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought may be renewed from and for the margins. But as a student of both history and modern political science, in as much as I work in the same wave-length with Chakraborty, I stand to differ a little, because the present world order does not provide for an absolute provincialization because we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly or indirectly affects the other, which presupposes that I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be, if I could borrow the words of Dr. King. Just as we must avoid a superficial optimism, we must also avoid a crippling optimism. Even though all progress is precarious, within limits real social progress may be made in different circles of the African continent. If and if only we are ready to decolonize our entire history from where we have been constantly kept for centuries. We need them and they need us too, what we should avoid is allowing them to make decisions for us, let us treat them as business partners and not our decision makers. To me, there is more work left to the Modern historians to start producing from the Afrocentric perspective and not from the Eurocentric point of view. Why should we as Africans placidly be encouraging other people to present our history according to their own views? Bad news about the African continent is always permeated by Eurocentric writers who have never been to Africa. They have the uncanny knowledge of writing the African history in their own way. There is a Zimbabwean proverb which says “Until lions start writing down their own stories, the hunters will always be the heroes”. As Gramsci coined the term organic intellectuals to describe conscious members of the working class whom he felt must be developed in contradistinction to the traditional intellectual, we as young Africans and writers have the responsibility of decolonizing our continent by using our pens and books. I have been guided by the specialization theory which I believe leads us to a stratified society. I’m not a strict follower of Plato’s philosopher king theory, but yet I do believe in his tripartite division of the state into the Rational, Spirited and Appetitive parts. They all have their individual roles to keep the state moving and functioning adequately. The concept of leadership is the acceptance of a specific obligation in return for a secured existence, specific obligation connotes the instinctive disposition of certain virtues and values which our leaders are to epitomize prudently and assiduously to us. Our politicians should stop following the crowd in a lapdog manner with an unbelievable gullibility. When a supposed aid is given to Africans, the westerners urge our leaders to accept expatriates from the west to monitor the aid in Africa, as if we are so incompetent to handle our own affairs. In most cases, about 60% of the aid is used to serve the needs of the expatriates but that can never be included when they are analyzing ways the monies were spent. In the end, African leaders are most times blamed for misappropriating the funds. But how many African leaders can stand up to the Westerners and say enough is enough. Most are afraid of not being called benevolent despots, tyrants and dictators. As an African leader you have to work according to the dictates of the Western powers or risk being called names and subsequently ask for regime change in your country. They dictate the pace of our African leaders, so you have to be in their good books at all time. There are always two main types of legitimacy, that of Entrance and performance legitimacy. Since the politicians are responsible for making decisions according to which the entire continent will be governed, they must have the virtue of capacity to comprehend reality and to make impartial judgments about it and not judgments that fit their political situations at a given time while the rest of the continent is left to pay the price. Finally, it can be a disservice to my conscience if I failed to ask you all present here today to help me pray for the three West African States ravaged by the Ebola outbreak. For over eight months now people are prevented from touching one another which is the basic Afro-human gesture of luv, care and affection. Ebola has claimed nearly 8,000 lives, disrupting trade and business, and has cost the economies of those three countries. In fact the economic effects of this deadly virus has rippled beyond the sub-region, some other countries have suspended flights to those three countries. . Families have been torn apart, children orphaned and homes and businesses abandoned. But I want to use this opportunity to say thanks to those African countries who have stood by us during such trying times. I pray for God Almighty to give us the fortitude to overcome the Post-Ebola challenges. A lot of conflicting accounts and conspiracy theories have emerged about the cause or causes of the virus, but I don’t want to belabor that point, all I can say is for the African leaders to put on their thinking cap and start critically evaluating deals they make with the West. Money can be of great importance but money should not be made at the expense of the greater majority. May I use this opportunity to say thanks to all those who have supported the idea of the Macpherson Foundation which shall be registered and launched in my country, Sierra Leone to help the Post-Ebola orphans. I thank all for listening, I thank you.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 23:17:40 +0000