“God in His own wisdom made each race in a unique way with its own unique culture to serve His purpose. Until we Africans understand this and begin to develop our uniqueness as the other races have done instead of trying to be like them, we will forever be dependent on them and always feel inferior to them.”
This cry for the African to be him/herself has become necessary and indeed urgent because most Africans now think they are doing the right thing only if it is also done by the Caucasians (“whiteman”). In the extreme case, the African feels he/she is more like a human being when he/she is like the Caucasian. In simple terms, our standard of measurement has become “white” i.e. “white” is good and of course “black” is bad. If not why is it that anyone who cannot express him/herself in any of the former slave master’s language i.e. English, French, Portuguese, etc. no matter how fluent he/she is in any of our indigenous languages ridiculed? Why has the bleaching of our black skin to look “white” by both men and women and the straightening of our kinky hair particularly by our women become the order of the day? Why have foreign dishes, I mean that of the Caucasians and the Mongoloids (“yellowman”) become the preserve of the rich with a symbol of prestige attached to it? Why has it become an elevation of one’s status to have a Caucasian friend or companion even among our university students?
I am of the view that the root cause of all these is the acceptance of the doctrine of the inherent inferiority of the African to the Caucasian. This candid observation is better expressed by Dr. Mensa Otabil in Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia, “Many black people have mentally accepted the logic of black is inferior. We may not verbalize it or even be are aware of it but it is in our subconscious minds.” One need not look far to see the truthfulness of this assertion. There is the popular saying that if on your way to church you meet a “whiteman” you better return for you have met God. Ludicrous, isn’t it? Well, this should give you fair idea of the depth of the inferiority complex.
The cry to be ourselves is therefore a call for the rejection of this baseless doctrine of African inferiority. Baseless grounds on which this theory has been propounded have been proven to be nothing but big, bad, terrible lies fabricated to keep us in perpetual servitude. An example is the Hamitic hypothesis used to justify the establishment of grim, grisly and ghastly political institutions like apartheid in South Africa Canaan , the fourth son of Ham and not Ham himself who was the recipient of the curse. The text explicitly states the “Let Canaan be cursed.” That aside, the basis of this Hamitic hypothesis which is that the three sons of Noah represented three different “races” namely, Shem (“Mongoloid”), Ham (“Negroid”) and Japheth (“Caucasian”) is absurd to say the least. As Rev. Dr. Cain Hope Felder points out it in his introduction to the Original African Heritage Study Bible (King James Version), it does not even make sense logically or scientifically to say that “within the ten generations from Adam to Noah (and without the introduction of any outside factor) a genetic change took place which allowed one man (Noah) and his one wife (of the same race as himself) to produce children who were racially different.” But this of course is what they would like us to believe.
It is high time we stopped rewarding these criminal doctrines with a rejection of ourselves and rather in the words of Langston Hughes, “…express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” It has become imperative that we be ourselves because this attempt to be like the Caucasians and in the process rejecting ourselves has not only resulted in a high moral degeneracy and juvenile delinquency hitherto unheard of in our society but it has also led to the loss of our respect and dignity simply because he who has no respect for himself has no respect from others.
Being ourselves means we must be original. In other words, rather than reject, let us accept who we are and what we have and develop them to suit the times or conditions when and where necessary. As R.S Rattray, (a Caucasian) notes in Ashanti (a microcosm of Africa) “the ideal should be, not to become pseudo-European but to aim at progress for their race based upon what is best in their own institutions, religion, their manners and customs and that the Ashanti [African] will become better and finer men and women by remaining true Ashanti [African] and retaining a certain pride in their past, and that their greatest hope lies in the future, if they follow and build upon lines with which the national sunsum or soul has been familiar since they first were a people.” What else have we been than African since creation?
san-kofa
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