Our Place on Earth (cont'd)

The idea that Africans are positioned to control their destiny in the continent is hard to understand when the narrative is of Africa’s best people fleeing the continent by all means and those left behind subsisting in constructs ravaged by tyranny, corruption and conflict. Surely, the image of imminent progress cannot be portrayed by the maim-bodied coming from the ravages of war, or of the exhausted of mind and spirit frustrated by the inertia of those who have spent decades in power and with a the blessing of certain alien regressive forces remain intransigent in the face of global changes and the demands of a new Africa they are incapable of managing.

This is further complicated by the news of the Americans, Chinese and Indians flocking in, controlling not just big business but also competing with native peddlers on the streets selling home grown staples. It looks more like a new colonization, apparently free of overt discrimination and favoritism may be taking hold in Africa more so than organic and genuine liberation. It is a confusing picture to a casual observer and only becomes better understood when one considers that the new comers are coming in under different terms than the Europeans did centuries ago.

Europeans came to Africa under terms that have been described as predatory and racist, and thrived on divide and rule policies that disrupted the natural flow of life and relationships between the individuals, peoples, and communities they encountered. They also erected a contrived narrative that de-humanized the African and still lingers in the relationships between them and us. They arrived using brute force and deceit to enforce a master-servant relationship on the continent in which the African was exploited, ignored and upon which the narrative was institutionalized that allows room today for some of them to proclaim that a concept like democracy is a luxury for Africans. They came in with a mindset of a “superior being,” nurtured in a master-slave culture that victimized both slave and master, and in the final analysis blinded both to that which works and is mutually beneficial and enduring.

It is this historical reality that has left an opening to the new comers to Africa, who come speaking a seemingly different language and dancing to a tune that is yet to be fully understood. But there is no doubt that they are here as a result of the failures of what had existed before. François Barateau, the Counselor at the French embassy in Chad could not have said it any better when he told a reporter in June of this year that “it must be recognized that 20 to 30 years of cooperation have not produced many results. “Nowadays it is the Chinese who are coming, and I guess we’ll see.” 

The picture of European influence fading out and being replaced by new comers is not a favorable picture for Africans and continues to reveal that those who come to Africa come better equipped to dominate the African in their respective countries. This leaves the African in a weak and untenable situation where he or she is unable to compete even at home and allowed no room to grow in a world that is not sitting still and clearly not waiting for Africa to catch up.

This is a situation that calls on all the muscles and ingenuity of Africa to be flexed and go to work. To work, not like a slave working for a master but like a man and woman working for the well being of the family, community, village, town and nation. This is a new demand for Africans. For they have not been allowed to be themselves for centuries and have been forced to work for the benefit of foreigners. It is a demand that again forces the African to flex his muscles, not at the crack of the taskmaster’s or his surrogate’s whip, but from the desire to make tomorrow a better day for his or her family, community, village, town and nation. It is a demand that requires a new mindset, a new response to duty and a new attitude to each other in order to accomplish new goals that must be the creation of a new vision for what would be in effect a new African and Africa.