30 June 2010

By Reason Wafawarova

GIVING a lecture at Wellesley College in Boston, Massachu-setts, Louis Farrakhan had this to say; "We are not oppressed because we are Black; we are oppressed because we are ignorant. It is ignorance that keeps us on the bottom, not Blackness."

Many times we are made to think so much against the blackness of our skin, to fight that blackness and to try and change it.

It is not the blackness of the African skin that we must be fighting but the darkness of our ignorance, the blackness of a deep-seated lack of knowledge.

It is this kind of ignorance that makes the life of an African a life of contradictions.

We inherited, cherished and perpetuated colonial educational systems that make us dumb, that teach us not to think; welfare systems that keep us poor and perpetually dependant, foreign aid that keeps our nations in a permanent state of poverty, religious establishments that are going to send us to hell; we embrace international laws that maintain inequality.

There is this vain motivation that makes our people seek an education.

Many of our people believe that knowledge is meant to make us acquire a decent home, a good job, a nice car and a decent savings account.

Real knowledge must make the African provide decent homes to others, provide good jobs, manufacture nice cars and own banks where other people can have decent savings.

We need to evolve from a system of contradictions that is often projected in our African parents, a system that creates self-defeating attitudes, negative self-perceptions and frustrations. We have allowed the global charity industry to grow into a billion-dollar enterprise at our own expense.

The West is now awash with professional philanthropists whom we consider helping professionals — ultimately helping themselves to us, rather than helping us.

They have earned obscenely comfortable lives in the name of our perpetual plight, and the educated among us choose to join their ranks and to maintain the status quo of our so-called Dark Continent.

As Amos N Wilson noted in the book "The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness", the response of some of our African people to the contradictions of the world order dictated to us by the Westerner is "over-compensation".

We see some people who will strive to prove to the white folk that we blacks are the greatest in the world.

Wilson argues that sometimes we notice a success by our own black people that is, in fact based on failure; a success that can be considered to be in itself a type of failure.

This is the type of success that is void of satisfaction and peace — a success that makes someone feel psychologically cheated.

This is success that comes with obsession and compulsiveness, and many times it is this kind of success that gets some African leaders piling up stolen monies in European banks.

We aspire to be like this wonderful white image of success that we actually want to disappear into the white man so we can prove that we have made it to be like him; and to have our money in the same banks with him, have our kids studying and staying in the homeland of the wonderful white man.

We feel unsafe to keep within Africa whatever riches we acquire because we always see imminent disaster pursuing us — imminent disaster created by the pressure that pushes us to emulate the lifestyle of the foreigner in the West, a lifestyle we feel is threatened by the sea of poverty-stricken masses surrounding us.

The reality of the world we live in today is that the white man dominates other races in as far as world affairs are concerned; economically, politically and even militarily. Caucasian people are not at our stage of development in Africa.

We are coming out of colonialism, we are struggling under imperialism; and we are still grappling from a dark night of ignorance.

The Caucasian should not think that Western evolution makes him superior. The Caucasian comes not from such a great background himself.

These are people who struggled with life in the hills and caves of Europe. They did not know how to bury their dead or how to cook their food, and the British are still not the best of cooks.

Yet you hardly ever hear the Europeans ever talking about their beginnings. You do not find Europeans glorifying the caves. It is nothing to talk about. They have put that behind them and they have moved on, and we must equally evolve from our past into a bright future that we shape for ourselves.

We cannot be studying Egyptology so that we can prove to the white man how great we are, or hope that one day when the white man admits and acknowledges that Egyptians were black Africans — then he will accept us as human beings.

Our study of Egyptology or that of the greatness of African architecture at Great Zimbabwe; cannot be a collective defence mechanism, or a means of dealing with our hurt pride. We cannot use our past as a means of trying to slip into the acceptance of white people.

We cannot hang-up with history and exaggerate certain of our achievements as a way of salvaging our damaged ego.

We always have this ache of inferiority that never seems to go away. Our people study and graduate in their thousands from various universities, but the sense of inferiority persists.

This is because our motivation is wrong; it is because we are pushed by the wrong reasons.

The problem with this kind of motivation is that even if we manage to replace those who oppress and rule over us, we will only end up being exactly like them. Wrong motivations set our minds up for being inculcated and possessed by the very devil we fight against.

This is why we need to change the way Africa is proceeding right now, otherwise another revolution will have to be fought; and it will have to be fought against us.

This is not a revolution by Caucasian-sponsored political parties, the so-called "pro-democracy" parties and so forth. We are talking of a revolution of African masses seeking to free themselves from imitators of the Caucasian; from people who respond to Western domination and oppression by over-compensating themselves in a bid to catch up with the white folk.

We cannot build African economies on development aid. That brings a victory that leaves the taste of ashes in our mouths. African economic success is not a matter of making it in the system that has been set up by the European. It is a matter of questioning that very system.

Our success is not just a matter of equality within the system but a result of critical analysis of the entire system.

It is not enough for us Africans to look at the system and react with rage, apathy, stereotypy, paranoia, suspicion, depression or mania. We cannot confront this system with bourgeoisie nationalism either.

We have to be very careful and make sure that we do not see our suffering masses as only in dire need of comprehensive lessons in liberation history, the great history of Africa, lofty ideals of morality, patriotism, sovereignty and so forth.

What we are fighting against is what Apostle Paul called "principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." This is what the Imperial system led by the United States is like.

We are not fighting just a mindset of a repressive people. We are fighting against real flesh and blood people who control the world’s economic system, its social system, and its military system.

Though of great importance, mere knowledge about our liberation legacy, our great African history, morality, patriotism, or sovereignty is not going to be enough to extricate us from the situation we are in today as Africans.

We need to dismantle the system established in Africa by the Westerner and not seek to survive within its dictates; not to emulate it and hope for the best.

We cannot keep looking at white, yellow, or brown people; crying endlessly about our own condition. It is time we learn what there is in order to evolve on our own — not to aspire to evolve into whiteness.

Louis Farrakhan pointed out that when an embryo is being formed, the first thing to be formed is the head and after it has developed then hands and other limbs are formed.

God knows the futility of giving hands and limbs without a head. It is the head that tells limbs what to do.

Yet post-independent Africa agrees to a world economic order headed by the G8 and by its former colonisers.

Africa agrees to a UN Security Council headed by five non-African countries, and Africa agrees to an International Criminal Court whose entire trials list is made up of five African countries and 13 individuals all from Africa — and that in a period of 12 years.

How can we as Africans say we can do without our own global leader economically, politically and at international law?

Why are we wondering that our hands have done next to nothing?

What do you do with only your hands and feet?

Dance Kwasa kwasa?

Does that build a nation?

The Westerner has sought to be our head so that we remain his hands and feet. In fact labourers are literally called "general hands" by those who own and run industries.

Every African leader who has stood for black people has been castigated, demonised, and many have been destroyed. Zimbabweans must simply forget about working positively with Westerners until President Mugabe is fatally discredited or even destroyed.

No amount of progress will make Westerners ever work with such a strong African leader who chooses to stand and defend the rights of his own people. That is the fate of Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government.

They did not agree to work with Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Haile Selassie or Kenneth Kaunda.

These are some of our African nationalists who sought to head the economic affairs of the African continent and they were castigated, demonised, assassinated, murdered in cold blood, and discredited as examples never to be followed.

Africa is a continent with a long history of a people that have not been treated right. It is a wonder that we somehow think that the people who did not treat us right in the past can teach us right today.

We continue to seek total dependency on the Caucasian for food, clothing, education, shelter and employment. We even think that Caucasians can teach us democracy.

What rank naivety!

Our minds have been fed wrong and we behave wrong. Our youth hate themselves and are ashamed of the blackness of our skin.

How could we be fed properly and yet we hate ourselves?

How can we say we are well educated and yet we deny ourselves?

How do we expect other people to love us and yet we do not love ourselves?

How do we expect other people to respect us and yet we do not respect ourselves?

Why should we expect other people to do for us what we are unwilling to do for ourselves?

When one looks at how the Westerner has sought to steal, plunder, exploit, suppress, oppress and enslave, it becomes no exaggeration to say man has become so weak and wicked that he has lowered himself to the level of a beast.

Western knowledge is being used to destroy rather than to build. That behaviour is beastly in nature.

The US calls itself the world leader today but it uses its knowledge to destroy the planet and so many nationalities.

We are not being taught by human beings but by deadly beasts. It is a wonder the world is expected to show human qualities when we are being led and taught by beasts.

When our people are feeding from the Western teacher of democracy, they are feeding from death itself.

All that is wanted through the "democratisation process" is to create client regimes and to own and control our people, as well as our resources.

Farrakhan warned the United States to be careful about its foreign policy doctrine of maintaining its position of supremacy by might.

He said, "When you suck the blood of the peoples of the world, at some point there is going to be a natural combustion because people are going to revolt against the man who knows and kept knowledge from others to oppress, enslave and exploit them."

Is Africa heading for this revolting or are we still in the comfort zone of putting up with subjugation and inferiority?

Africa we are one and together we will overcome.

It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawaro va.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

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