Black ignorance, not black skin Thomas Sankara

Reason Wafawarova on Monday
GIVING a lecture at Wellesley College in Boston, Massachusetts, 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.”

We beg for what we already have — our country is extremely rich, yet we remain poor, we are stuck without a currency of our own, yet we suffer sitting on land so endowed with excessive mineral wealth. We think our problem is lack of money, when in fact our greatest handicap is our mindset. We lack the brains to lead ourselves, and we want to depend on others for our own success.

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. We aspire to look like light-skinned races, and that is why we are bleaching our skins in the sad belief that skin lightness will increase our beauty and self-esteem.

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.

There is a prevailing ignorance that makes the life of an African a life of contradictions and misery.

We inherited, cherished and perpetuated colonial education systems that make us dumb, that teach us not to think; welfare systems that keep us poor and perpetually dependent, 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.

Where is our hope right now as a nation? Some have placed their hope in Western sanctions thinking they will facilitate regime change, and subsequently happiness ever after?

Some are hoping one powerful nation will just walk in with bags of money to fund our various economic projects, with our role limited to enjoying freely given benefits. This kind of naivety would be laughable if we did not take ourselves this seriously in our hopelessness.

There is this vain motivation that makes our people seek an education for its own sake. Many of us post our newly acquired degrees on social media hoping to elevate our social standing that way. We believe we become people of better standing if we earn academic titles, or get a few degrees to our names.

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. Colonialism taught us to get an education that will entitle us to decent jobs, and we have never seen education in any other light.

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 are not doing any business ourselves. We just hope real business people from real business countries will be impressed by our business environment and somehow flock in to start all sorts of business in our midst. This is our mindset, a mindset of utter hopelessness.

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. I have personally raised millions of dollars for various charities that mainly work on the African continent, and I know too well how the hopelessness of the African is a good selling point for any fundraiser worthy the name.

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

Some of them 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 and perpetuate 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.

So the black market money-changers of Harare have become our idols of success and wealth. What do they do for a living? They sell money to people who should access it as they earn it, but have been deprived of that right. So our role models of success are essentially criminals who should be languishing in jails.

This is the type of success that is void of satisfaction and peace.

This is success that comes with obsession and compulsiveness, the kind of success we hanker for when we contest to become elected political leaders. We want to loot and enrich ourselves, to drive nice luxurious cars bought by the suffering public, to travel around the world with the taxpayer footing it all for us, and we want huge salary perks to come with our election into office. We believe winning an election is the pathway to riches.

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.

I see kids dumped here in Australia to fend for themselves in one of the most expensive places on this planet, because their parents want to keep them here as bragging right when they are with friends back in Zimbabwe. They want to brag that my child stays in a whiteman’s country and goes to university with white kids. Some of these kids have resorted to drugs and prostitution to try and cope with the demanding cost of living here.

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. We are scared of the sea of poverty surrounding us, so we stash our wealth in far away countries.

The reality of the world we live in today is that the whiteman dominates other races inasfar as world affairs are concerned; economically, politically and even militarily.

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

The Caucasian should never 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 not far too long ago. They did not know how to bury their dead or how to cook food.

Yet you hardly ever hear the Europeans 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 our children and ourselves.

We cannot be studying Egyptology so that we can prove to the whiteman how great we are, or hope that one day when the whiteman 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 bruised 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.

Some of us think we can win every argument by bragging about our ancestry or how we gallantly fought down the British colonial empire. Hey, the Empire has evolved into another form and we must wake up and make the best of our country today and now.

We always have this ache of inferiority that never seems to go away. Our people study and graduate in tens 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.

We need to change the course of things in our country, otherwise another revolution will have to be fought, and it will have to be fought against our own liberation movement.

I am not talking of a revolution by Caucasian-sponsored political parties, the so-called “pro-democracy” parties and so forth. We are talking of a revolution of Zimbabwean 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 the Zimbabwean economy 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 world 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 need strategy, not emotion.

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 Zimbabwe; velvety ideals of morality, patriotism, sovereignty and so forth.

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

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 its former colonisers, and hopes to be better off that way.

Africa agrees to a UN Security Council headed by five non-African countries, and Africa agrees to an International Criminal Court whose mandate is to target African offenders.

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.

Robert Mugabe’s era is gone, but his legacy perpetuates revered among African luminaries and icons.

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

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 treat us right today, that they can save us.

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! Democracy is a system for people who respect themselves, not for people who respect white people while they hate themselves.

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 so much 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?
  • Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia

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