Did they say reading provide missing links to those knowledge which tends to bar us from essential information and the prerequisite that leads to our developments and advancement? In the arrays of spurring our superstructures and increasing the speed of our continent's historical movements from one generation to another, there is need to avail ourselves and those of our communities on the challenging infrastructures that are crucial to putting in place the economic, political and social balance of Africa's true growth index. Just as communism, capitalism and socialism has oftentimes allure mankind for over a thousand years to the gores of how best to develop each communities, in the same way feudal system became a thing of the past, as it was violently resisted by the proletariat at that economic and socio-politico era, so will Capitalism, Socialism and communism of this imperialist and colonialist barbarity against Africa and mankind give way to overseeing the importance of every social movement, and perhaps its economic undertone.
Imperialism is rooted in the idea that a certain group of superior people has the natural right to rule over all other supposedly inferior peoples. Euro-imperialism has justified and sustained itself through a sinister version of Christianity and its own ideological version of education. These tools of oppression have been used both to justify imperialism and to ensure the perpetuation of the superior/inferior dialectic through which it sustains itself. To a large extent, these methods of self-justification were only articulated after much imperial conquest had taken place in order to legitimize and sustain what was already occurring. In this way, the idea that indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa were inferior to superior European imperialists continued and reinforced the ideology of imperialism.
The idea of one's own supremacy or inferiority comes about through education and social conditioning. The idea that one is superior to other people is not a natural reaction. These judgmental assumptions have usually come about in order to facilitate the justification of one's exploitation of the supposed inferior other. For example, on a small level, if a group of friends in school have found that it is easy to take another student's lunch money, they will most likely add to their act of theft, a verbal denigration of the person. To these thieves, there probably was some derogatory image of the victim beforehand, but it will always be necessary for the group to reinforce the stupidity and inferiority of that individual in their own minds in order to justify to themselves their otherwise unjustifiable act.
On a larger scale, Africa and Africans have gone through the same transformation in the European mind in order to legitimize the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean and the later colonization of Africa. As Chinua Achebe has described it, "This perception problem is not in its origin a result of ignorance, as we sometimes are inclined to think. At least it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate invention devised to facilitate (these) two gigantic, historical events?" Winthrop Jordan has noted that, "Initially, therefore, English contact with Africans did not take place primarily in a context which prejudged the Negro as a slave.? Englishmen met Negroes merely as another sort of men." Yet by the eighteenth century, with the British slave trade at its peak, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow describe how the subject of British writing, "?shifted from almost matter-of-fact reports of what the voyagers had seen to judgmental evaluation of the Africans."The relation between enslavement of Africans and the development of European views that Africans were inferior human beings is quite close.
The two primary engines that facilitated the long-term perpetuation of this view have been the use of colonial education and the introduction of a version of Christianity that attempted to explain the supposed supremacy and inferiority of certain peoples. Initially these tools were united within Christian education. Only after the official abolition of enslavement was a differentiation made between secular and Christian education. Both of these, however, have been used to legitimize this fundamentally unreasonable view of superior and inferior peoples.
Initially, Christianity itself was a religion of protest in the Mid-East and North Africa against the oppressive imperialist Roman government. In order to protect the empire from this spiritual rebellion, Constantine, the Roman dictator, in 312 AD made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. The version that was accepted was one that could more easily be adapted to the intentions of the ruling power. Donatists and others were continually persecuted. Although it largely died out in Africa, except Ethiopia, after the Muslim invasion of the seventh and eighth centuries, Christianity emerged as the religion of Europe, where it was used by monarchs and nobles to dominate the general population.
For Europeans in the period following the colonization of the Americas, there was a great need to justify the brutal acts that they were committing. Historian Steve J. Stern has argued that "In short, if the year 1492 launched an era of 'discovery' in the Americas, the object of discovery was both the self and the other." This statement, although used to a different purpose by its author, lies at the center of the European articulation of their own superiority against a dark, evil, inferior 'other' whom they personified in their vision of indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa. It is important to note that, to a large extent, this justification was only articulated after many brutal acts had already been committed.
When Europeans saw what they had discovered in themselves and their own society, many of them, especially members of the church, found a need to either condemn or justify what was occurring. The missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas condemned the genocide of native peoples, whom he thought would make good Christians, while at the same time encouraging and profiting from the enslavement of Africans. With this type of reactionary humanitarianism in the conscience of many Europeans, a racial hierarchy developed based on the supremacy of Europeans and varying levels of inferiority of other peoples according to their acceptance of Christian brainwashing. To Las Casas and most Europeans, Africans were placed at the bottom of this hierarchy ostensibly because of their supposed inability to accept Christianity. In reality, the motive for such a categorization was to legitimize an African slave trade that was already underway and providing huge profits to a select few Europeans and the Iberian monarchies.
Yet even after fifteen million Africans had been taken in chains to the Americas, Europeans were still trying to indoctrinate them in Christianity. Although the idea of their own supremacy was firmly engrained in the minds of most white Caribbean planters, they knew that such a view was unreasonable. For this reason, they knew that in order to maintain their precarious position, they had to systematically teach the Africans that they had enslaved that they and their African culture were inferior.
With Christianity, Europeans used Biblical stories, such as the curse of Ham, to justify African enslavement. Although this form of Christianity, which was used in the Caribbean to justify enslavement and ensure the submissiveness of the African population, taught that all human beings had been created by the same God, it saw Africans as the descendants of Ham, whom God had condemned to slavery for shaming his father. This doctrine held that Africans were 'natural slaves' because of this Biblical story. Thus, this form of religious 'education' taught the enslaved to be submissive and obedient to their enslavers in order to reach a better life after death.
However, despite the attempt to fit enslavement of Africans into the framework of Christianity, this rationale was not the reason for this European enslavement of others. Rather, after enslaving Africans in large numbers, Christianity was modified in order to justify what had already been done. This Christian indoctrination was meant to ensure obedience by severing people's ties to their ancestry and initiating a superiority/inferiority dialectic. As the film San Kofa illustrates, the acceptance of Christianity was often accompanied by the (symbolic) murder of one's parents and ancestry. The physical act of removing people from their homes was accompanied by the indoctrination that that home was evil, inferior, and something to be ashamed of, even if one was now enslaved.
The severance of ancestry and indigenous culture has continued in secular education as stereotypes of African, indigenous American, and Indian cultures and peoples have continued. Arnold Itwaru has shown how, "There is a tradition in the reading of English and European literatures which refuses to consider the importance of the imperializing vision in many of these works."When works by such authors as Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Carlyle, and others are taught as 'universal', 'timeless', ahistorical and apolitical, their racist views are being passed down directly to the student without space for any criticism of this racism. This type of uncritical analysis is not restricted to literature, as the fields of history, political science, philosophy, and so on, continue to approach the world through the "gaze of Empire".
The effect of this 'gaze' is to perpetuate the imperialist vision in which certain peoples are inferior to others. While the story of Ham is no longer used to perpetuate such views, the myth of a savage, 'dark' Africa remains along with views about 'development' and 'progress'. Whether it is a "Darkest Africa" exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum or the uncritical teaching of books such as Heart of Darkness or the use of the term 'Third World', the imagery and fundamental idea of inferiority of certain peoples is still evident in much of society, both in Euro-America and the Caribbean itself.
For so long, Africans have undergone deculturation of our cultural practices and spirituality. Or is it imperative to denounce one’s traditional cultural practices and spirituality in order to become a true Christian (civilized)? In spite of more than 500 years of deculturation, exploitation, slavery and the subtle promotion of ethnic tension, Africans has still yield or transformed their soul persons, which is tied to the acupunctures of their cultural identities, neither have they yield to the consciousness of the western or Arabized religious doctrines, precepts, concepts but remained as divided, mean, and cruel to each other as ever before. Even the prospects for peace, reconciliation, national socio-economic development, and stability in Sub-Saharan of Africa continue to get dimmer and dimmer by every hour of the day as its national leaders juggle for political power and prestige among themselves while ordinary citizens wrestled daily with poverty, malnutrition, deforestation, environmental pollution, and disease such as preventable malaria that kills a Black child every second.
In search for God consciousness, Africans seemed to believe that "God” would come from outside of Africa to save and feed Africans just as in the misconceived, mis-interpreted biblical epics. As a result, we generally take pleasure in bestowing as our spiritual mental, denominations or persons with no proven records of spiritual understanding and insight to develop our spiritual consciousness thereby leading us into one abyss of darkness after another. In modern Africa cultural history, the foundations of continental consciousness, leadership, good governance, spirituality and rule of law were built on a soil of juggled fabrics such that Africa is easily prone to “spiritual erosion”, "political erosion", mis-education, and instability.
To sustain itself as a sovereign Continent, the people of Africa must begin to seriously find its spiritual root and educate its traditional spiritual leaders and people to tell our people’s God concept or no one else will. The Europeans with their God concept cannot tell us about our harmonious cultural and spiritual vibrations, only Africans with their depth of so many cultural-spiritual journey can narrate the dendrites of our cultures and traditions and indeed spiritualities are connected. For anyone with a sense of imagination can easily see that our mothers’ tongues and ancestral system of spirituality hold the past, the present, and the future to together because their ontology place more emphasis on the collective prosperity, environmental stewardship and survival of Africa and people of the world. But sadly, the people of the western world have never truly sought to understand our spirituality, traditions, and the godship of ours in particular.
As a result, when the westerners made a mess of their cesspool, they created artificial standards, official languages, traditions, cultures, religious laws and conducts that all nations had to obey as "gospel." And somewhere in that process, our people and other indigenous people lost appreciation for the spiritual and cultural values dearest to us at large-those spiritual and social practices that sustain us through the centuries. We need to return to those mothers’ tongues, spiritual values and leadership styles, cultural institutions that promoted less violence if we must ever free ourselves from the stranglehold of religious and psychological dominance.
Today, the superiority/inferiority dialectic that was initiated with the rise of Euro-imperialism is perpetuated, usually unwittingly, in a political and social system that is based fundamentally on its own predecessor, imperialism. As Orlando Patterson has noted, "far from declining, (slavery) actually increased in significance with the growth of all the epochs and cultures that modern Western peoples consider watersheds in their historical development". Whether ancient Greece, Rome, or Enlightenment Europe and America of the eighteenth century, Western education still trains people to admire societies in which large sections of humanity were treated as sub-human, inferior. Patterson has also shown that the Western love of 'freedom' was closely associated with the rise of slavery. "The joint rise of slavery and cultivation of freedom was no accident. It was a socio-historical necessity." Thus, it could be argued, when one speaks of a love of 'freedom', one is referring to one's own freedom in relation to the enslavement or deprivation of freedom to others.
The entire theory of development that drives institutions of exploitation such as the IMF, the World Bank, and others begins at a point of departure very similar to that of imperialism. This concept lies at the base of most economic and so-called 'development' education. The politicians of most of the Caribbean, Africa, and the rest of the Two-thirds World have been educated in this philosophy and thus pursue economic policies that assume the inferiority of their own societies. Walter Rodney asserts that "development and underdevelopment are not only comparative terms, but they also have a dialectical relationship one to the other: that is to say, the two help produce each other by interaction." Thus, economic misdevelopment continues and only serves to reinforce the idea that non-Western societies are inferior to a wise, all-knowing, 'developed' Euro-America.
The basic construct of vision and frame of reference for imperialism's successor society of today is one in which the basic tenets of imperialism, "superiority" and "inferiority", remain firmly intact. There is no difference between the 'curse of Ham' and 'darkest Africa' except that the latter is still part of mainstream society. The concepts of inferiority and superiority were and still are used in a dual attempt by imperialism to both justify itself and ensure its own continuation.
REFERENCES
i Achebe, Chinua and Robert Lyons. "Africa's Tarnished Name" in Another Africa. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. (p.103)
ii Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black. New York: Norton & Co., 1977 (1968). (p.4)
iii Hammond, Dorothy and Alta Jablow. The Myth of Africa. New York: Library of Social Science, 1977. (p.22)
iv The following information came from Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
v Stern, Steve J. "Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics." In The Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 24, Issue Quincentenary Supplement. (1992), (p.25)
vi Itwaru, Arnold Harrichand and Natasha Ksonzek. Closed Entrances. Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1994. (p.7)
vii Ibid., (p.73-107)
viii Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1982. (p.vii)
ix Ibid., p.ix.
x Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Villiers Publications, 1988 (1972). (p.75)
