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Issue 00606 |
March 6 - 12, 2010 |
issn 0856 - 9135 |
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Society |
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Time for harvest has come LUKE MBEFO, C.S.Sp. Students of the history of ideas will recall this commonplace: many obviously self-assured thinkers announce with some regret that their intuitions were ahead of their era. It remained for a latter generation to capture and implement those insights. Copernicus, for instance, computed the heliocentric system of the universe but kept it for a later generation to publish. Galileo was imprisoned for vindicating his hero with the help of the telescope. Philosophers like Kant and Leibniz equally felt that their contemporaries were not intellectually equipped to understand their philosophical disquisitions. How does this observation concern Africa? Then listen to this.
This conviction is
really the choke that fuelled the freedom fighters, our erstwhile often
forgotten African patriots. These were people who believed in the
autonomy of the African people to arrange their world as they saw best.
They did not build a Great Wall like China to wade off foreign incursion
but they exhibited courageous resistance to foreign occupation. There
were myriads of undocumented resistances to European and Arabic slavery
on both the Atlantic and Indian seaboards of the Continent. The
Mau-Mau and the Maji-Maji of Kenya and Tanganyika
respectively were clandestine and populist resistance movements. The
same could be said of the Ekumeku and Ohafia head-hunters
of the West African coast. But how could arrows and witchcraft withstand
the maxim guns and heavy artilleries of the invaders? The difference in
the fire-power was simply awesome. The entire world knows about the
Holocaust suffered by the Jews under the Nazis. Nobody speaks of the
slaughter fields that accompanied the so-called “scramble for Africa”.
In his acceptance speech of his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, Wole
Soyinka of Nigeria attributed the forgiving spirit of Africans to their
upbringing in African Traditional Religion. I am sure this hypothesis is
open to disputation. Nevertheless, however way it has become history,
European imperialism did hamper the development of the indigenous spirit
of creativity that would have been the expression of the African genius.
European presence with its superior provisions for the conditions of
human activity made Africans dependent. The evidence for this is the
self-assumed obligation of the colonialists to build up the African
personality in the way human personality has emerged in Europe. This is
the real meaning of the colonial project code-named “the white man’s
burden”.
Luke Mbefo, C.S.Sp Spiritan Missionary Seminary, NJIRO-ARUSHA.
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Perhaps
of all the continents of the world, Africa has been the most abused and
the most misused. It does not seem correct to dismiss its slavery and
colonial past as an episode in its history as some historians have
tended to do. Indeed the long-term effect of that phase of its history
has been a sense of inferiority when Africans are dealing with their
peers. Poverty, misgovernment, corruption, disease and allied
negativities have combined to sustain its underdeveloped status and
location as the outsider on the margin of civilization. Europeans are
not tired of reminding Africans of all the economic aids they have
poured into the continent and the lack of fruit such helps have failed
to deliver. Should it continue to remain a pariah region of the world’s
mercy fund? Although it has minerals, it has no indigenous engineers to
mine them. Although it has agriculturally fertile fields, it lacks the
theoretical know-how. Evidently the time has come for all that miserable
impression to change. The most recent indication of the change in
attitudes and in the 
