Continental Africans and the Africans in Diaspora: A 'Black World' divided upon Itself

In the 50s and 60s, when there was established consciousness, Continental Africans and African-Americans were gradually forging a powerful UNITED FRONT against Euro-oppressive powers. We had the likes of Nkrumah and Muhammad Ali coming together for the common good of Africa and the future of the entire 'Black World'. Long before them, we had W.E.B DuBois, Marcus Mosiah Garvey among others who postulated and fervently pursued the concept of Pan-Africanism and the economic emancipation of Africa.

Scholars like Papa John Henrik Clarke, Amos Wilson and others gave us the blueprints. Malcolm X was available with his fiery stance. Kwame Nkrumah was on ground to articulate and implement. Nnamdi Azikiwe was available to think along the continental line. The African-Americans were at the forefront of the battle. They were fighting three wars simultaneously: The war to free Africa, the war for the unity of the 'Black man and the Black woman' and the war against destructive racism in the Western hemisphere. Great ones!

Suddenly, the bullets began to fall. Martin Luther King Jnr gone. Malcolm X fell. Lumumba killed. Nkrumah deposed and left to be dejected. Steve Bantu Biko exterminated and in later years, Thomas Sankara. As this confusion reigned, the unity began to tear apart. Handshakes were no longer seen between the African-Americans, Africans in the Caribbean and the Continental Africans.

To set the record straight, Continental Africans are the major problem of the 'Black world'. We are the ones whose people sold some of the ancestors of the African-Americans into slavery. Whenever African-Americans are killed, we do not speak up for them. Even when the likes of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jnr were fighting for us, we were busy selling our resources cheaply to the same Supremacists and oppressors. The truth hurts but it must be told. Our grand slavery of the mind tore up every possibility of creating a better African world.

Whenever they are killed in America or elsewhere, we do not stand up for them yet they do not hesitate to lend their voices of protest whenever calamities happen to us in Africa. If anything happens to any Jew anywhere in the world, the state of Israel stands up for them. When South Africans proposed to get back their stolen lands back, Australia spoke first in defence of the European immigrants and apartheid villains (Whites) followed by Donald Trump. They will defend one another anywhere but this is not the case for Africans. 

This is the reason why many Africans in diaspora prefer to stick with the 'Black Identity' than the 'African Identity'. We have the African civilisation (Nubian, Kemetic, Benin, Ife, Dahomey, Zulu, Xhosa and others), the European Civilisation (Greek, Roman and others), the Asian Civilisation (Chinese, Indian, Japanese and others), the Arabian civilisation and many more but not a 'White Civilisation', 'Yellow Civilisation' or 'Black Civilisation'. In a bid to move away from anything associated with Africa, some of them now believe they are 'Black Indians' who had inhabited America before the coming of Columbus. We cannot blame them. They need an identity. 

Rather than court the African-Americans to come and invest so we can build together, Africans will prefer to sell their lands into European and Chinese slavery. The African-Americans and Africans in diaspora have the capability to join forces with us and lead us out of our quagmire. Take our music industry for instance; it was those from Jamaica and the Caribbean (Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and others) that moved Reggae. We followed them. Fela Anikulapo Kuti was influenced by Malcolm X, the politics of the Black Panther Party and he was tutored by an African-American woman (Sandra Smith) before he became conscious. 

Our modern music industry copied from the African-American hip hop and rap. Our modern scientific discussion and advancement cannot be separated from the Africans in diaspora. They are our surest link and lifeline if we really genuinely want to break the shackles of mental slavery and embrace development. Had we listened to Garvey, we would have been economically liberated in Africa. 

The pride of African culture today remains the African-Americans and the Africans in diaspora in general outside of Africa. Here, we hate ourselves, we loath our cultures, we lack thinking, we are basically everything associated with leeches. Rather than look at the cultural beauty in our various ethnic groups as a platform to unite and be creative, we tune to the frequency of hate and insults. We call the African-Americans names because we lack basic sense of history; that they did more for us that we can ever do for them.

It is a known fact that our current crop of leaders are puppets, sell outs, coons and 'house Negroes' who will do anything and everything to please their European and Chinese masters. They are perfectly mentally enslaved and psychologically effete to lead us out of our morass. The youths must begin to have a rethink. We should use the power of the information age to reach-out to our brothers and sisters in America and in the diaspora, connect with them and stand up for them when necessary for us to be able to rebuild our Africa. The African-Americans and Africans in diaspora cannot afford to give up on us. Together, we can create a better African world. We should always remember our motherland always. 

Culture Inspires and Secures the mind of the Child for the Future

There is beauty and power in being who you are. There is respect in indigenous creativity and innovation. 

It is only when we teach our children about their cultures and the greatness of their ancestral past which they must draw inspiration from to rebuild their heritage before we can secure the future. The effect of the hatred of our cultural patterns and ideologies is what we are experiencing today. We have lost everything that defines us willfully ignorantly. The most disturbing is that, despite our knack for foreign beliefs and ideologies, we are still backward. If we believe our cultural values were barbaric, hence our passion for foreign cultures, why then are we still backward and stagnant?

We said our traditions were 'evil' and replaced them with 'pure' ones from Arabia and Europe, how come we are more brutal and destructive now with the 'pure' foreign beliefs and cultures? How come the world now study us to understand poverty and pestilence but continues to study our ancestors to understand greatness and mysterious organisation of ideas like the Nubian and Kemetic pyramids, the Great Benin Kingdom and its Queen Idia mask, the Amazon of Dahomey, Great wall of Nwanemutapa Kingdom, Ife bronze, Dogon of Mali and others? Those ancestral 'evil' days were surely better than the modern 'pure' era.

We were not backward in our ancestral days. That is a fact. We were only peacefully gullible. Our ancestors accepted foreigners with open minds and arms, partly due to their limited exposure and partly due to nature's over-convenience, so much so that their hospitality was used and turned against them. They dealt with a better prepared and well armed Arabian and European contemporaries. That a thief stole from you or a rapist was able to rape your daughter at gunpoint proves that the thief or rapist was better prepared and well armed for the heinous crime while you were innocently ignorant. That was the fate of our ancestors. 

After the robbery and rape, rather than sit, put our brains to task and map out plans to get out of our quagmire and secure our lands despite our modern education, we accepted and over-subscribed to the robber and rapist's definition of us. We accepted the robber and rapist's beliefs and ideologies wholeheartedly. While the robber went back to his land, modified his belief, never allowed dogmatism to reign in his mind, embraced science and technology, we continue to passionately defend his belief in our land and refuse to think out of the box. We continue to breed children in that line of mental incarceration so much so that we prefer to run and escape to the land of those who robbed and raped us, even if the sea will consume us, than build our own land.

African migrants trying to cross into Italy. They are youthful, vibrant and energetic but they prefer to risk their lives on the sea than use their youthful energy to make revolutionary changes in their countries. That is a sign of a conquered people.

By our mode of thinking and actions, we have accepted that we are a conquered people and we are helpless and maybe, hopeless to do anything. When solutions stare us in the face, we turn our eyes away. As long as it is not foreigners who are proffering the solution, we will block our ears. Whatever foreigners in Europe or Asia say is all we love to hear. What does it cost to think, map out sustainable plans and be resolute to build our land so that our descendants will not suffer like us again? Currently, we are already creating a future in which the innocent children of today will have to live in slavery tomorrow. What does it cost to embrace our heritage and creatively innovate our way out?

Conquering the African Minds: The Arrows of the Arabs and the Europeans

'When the White men came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. Then, they told us to close our eyes for prayer, when we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.' ~Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.
This quote has also been ascribed to the first President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. 

Going back to history is of no use here, it will simply be too trite and and banal because the world is not blind to the twin facts of slavery and colonialism. Africans continue to live in what can be termed the slavery-colonial world of self-destruction. The continent has taken on this banner copiously with ignorance and 'natural gullibility'. Whilst the Arabs upon making contacts with Africa realised the blessings nature has bequeathed to Africa and made all necessary attempts to tap from them, Africans were indoctrinated into a belief that would come to hunt, haunt and hurt them later.

Arabs bought goods and in a bid to maintain an upper hand, they enforced what would later be used to continuously control the minds of Africans. While the Dogon people of Mali had mastered the art of astronomy a very long time, they were mentally relaxed with the blessings of nature and it was not projected beyond their frontiers. This was true of most African ingenious knowledge and accomplishments. This was due to the relatively peaceful and tranquil environmental conditions where nutritional needs were rightly met on a daily basis. Though that was somehow the nature of the world ab initio, that of Africa was exceptional because of the extreme fertility its land had and still has.

From the stone age to the present era, food has always been the most important in the lives of man but man shall not live by bread alone, hence man needs to think of how to develop and advance. The African writing system was localised; serving only Africans but with the contact of the Arabs and the apparent 'brutal' conversion to Islam, Africans began to lose some of its indigenous contents. The Arabs were trading as well as forcing religion down the throats of Africans. They also took slaves down to the Mediterranean, castrated the men and they died with almost no traces as documented by the Tarikhs. While they were growing with the trade, Africans were studying the religion of Islam.

Then came the Europeans who dared nature and moved beyond their frontiers. They defiled all hurdles and mounted great audacity to conquer challenges and whatever barriers nature imposed on them. They learnt and stole. They ventured into Africa and other parts of the globe beginning from Amerigo Vespucci down to Columbus and the Conquistadors. What followed was the enslavement of Africans. While Africans were being enslaved which had the blessing of the Pope and other notable adherents of Christianity, Europeans also forced religion down their throats.

Africans were made to accept a new master. The apparent peace they witnessed using Africans as slaves and stealing from the ingenuity and discoveries of the slaves gave birth to the industrial revolution. One who has less worry of what to eat and work not will be equipped with the utmost mental capacity to think and project; hence they were growing while Africa was plundered. Now, they have given us alternatives to development which are the religions. The religions ensure we die today; killing one another in religious competition. The religions ensure we blame some supernatural forces like the days of our forebears who offered sacrifices to gods but they were better than us because they never depended on foreigners for solutions and they created civilisations that the world continues to bow for.

Africa was not made to evolve; its development and advancement was brutally, inhumanly and inhumanely truncated. Its worldview was replaced by another superstructure hinged on respecting the masters who gave Africans religions and took away vital and viable elements of growth and advancement. African parents teach children to read the Bible and the Quran in order to conquer heaven while it does not matter to them how miserable their existence is on planet earth. On the other hand the 'masters' teach their children to study the sciences, conquer self first, then their environment and the Universe far into space. In the end one remains a slave forever and the other the master eternally. Ironically, the same African parents are ready to spend huge sums to train their children in the masters' lands.

Even when the 'slave' is a bit polished to make him or her look near a master, being a master can never really be possible because the brain has been underdeveloped from childhood. There is lack of concept for and of the environment but that of heaven. The wealth is to be stored in heaven while begging is the only means to survive on planet earth. Today, some religious fundamentalists can wake to bomb people in Somalia, Central African Republic, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya and host of other places using the umbrella of a concept that was sold to Africa around the 9th century by the Arabs while the other, while trying to curb the activities of the so-called terrorists, would rush to the 'masters', the Europeans who imposed the second religious concept beginning from the 15th century.

Teresa Brennan captured this well in her treatise Globalization and its Terrors; Daily Life in the West. She said the brains of the South (Africans majorly) have been decimated and desecrated because they are malnourished; not eating properly and combated my extreme poverty while the bodies of the North are useless; obesity and weakness because of much affluence and extreme good life conditions. The good life of the North depends on the hunger and poverty of the South.

Thus, the brains of the North will always enslave the bodies of the South. Not that the people of the South have no brains but they are functioning below capacity. Not that the people of the North have no bodies too but they are rendered really useless because goodies of life. This brings to mind the rush to be in foreign lands by Africans which equals modern slavery. Brain drain. Africans believe in trying to walk through the valley of the shadow of death without fear of evil while their mates in other climes are walking in Space; moon and Mars. Today, Africans export clergies while they import technology.

It is not a crime for us to learn from the world but we must understand that no one can build our homes for us. Doing everything to be like others; Arabs and Europeans while losing our cultures and values is to our detriment. It is the reason why we are confused in the world today. We are the only ones that foreigners dictate how to live for.  We are the only ones in the world who want to be like others even when we are racially discriminated against. We are the only ones who steal our wealth and give it to those who will still insult us as being thieves and backward. If we refuse to correct our enslaved mindset and colonial mentality, then we have no right to complain or lament. We should accept our fate as a conquered people.