AFRICAN, KNOW THYSELF!

“If you know not who you are, your vision in life becomes blurred and you are therefore unable to chart the right course for the fulfilment of your mission in life.”

I am in perfect agreement with this forceful assertion made several decades ago by one of the foremost pan-African thinkers, Marcus Mosiah Garvey. A cursory glance at Africans (“blacks”) both at home and abroad makes it abundantly clear that the African without knowledge of his history and culture has imbibed wholesale Eurocentric views like the inferiority of the African to the Caucasian (“white”)  and everything Caucasian hence attempts by the African just to be like the Caucasian. Need I remind you of our secondary school days when woe betides any “bush boy” who dared eat any of our local dishes with his fingers? Being “civilized” meant eating with cutlery!

Knowledge as the Bible affirms is power and the lack of it makes a people perish. Even the slave master recognized this. A statement made by one United States of America senator, Henry Berry in as far back as 1832 to the Virginia House of Representatives with regards to how to keep the African slaves perpetually in bondage is worth noting. He stated, “We have as far as possible closed every avenue by which the light may enter the slave’s mind. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light our work may be complete. They will then be on the level of the beasts of the fields and we then should be safe.”

Well, chattel slavery may be over but the inordinate ambition of some to keep the African in perpetual servitude in order to continue the exploitation of our human and natural resources still lingers on. And in pursuit of this agenda, our history and culture has been distorted to make us despise our heritage. For instance, one Professor John Burgess, the founder of Columbia University graduate school of Political Science defined the African race as “ … a race of men which has never created any civilization of any kind.” Richard Burton, an explorer also noted, “The study of the Negro (African) is the study of man’s rudimentary mind. He would appear rather a degeneracy from the civilized man than a savage rising to the first step, were it not for his total incapacity for improvement …”

Sadly, the inherited colonial educational system and the Western controlled media still perpetuate this superior/inferior race philosophy. How many “educated” Africans know African contribution in the arts, business and sciences? But I bet you know that the “Father of History” is Herodotus and the “Father of Medicine” Hippocrates. No wonder an “educated” African can confidently say that the most stupid Caucasian can make a balloon but this the most intelligent African cannot do. The African’s religion has also been called derogatory names which neither reflects what the practioners believe in or even practice. You have heard it referred to as “ancestor worship” but they “forgot” to add that it is this same practice that is referred to in Christianity as “sainthood”. The end result is that the educated African produced is nothing but a brainwashed African who not only admires and seeks to imitate the Caucasian but also relies on them for his basic needs.

But no race of people ever progressed without knowing who they truly were. This therefore calls for the African empowering himself with the true knowledge of his history and culture. The importance of history as succinctly expressed by Dr. Henrik Clarke is that it not only tells a people what they have been and where they have been, what they are and where they are but most importantly it tells them what they still must be and where they still must go. The importance of culture on the other hand is that because it tells a people about their beliefs and practices, it gives them an insight into their thought patterns and behaviour and this thereby helps them in formulating policies that suit them.

Let us once and for all end in the words of Malcolm X the “… crime, the lie that has been told to generations of black men and white men both. Little innocent black children, born of parents who believed that their race had no history. Little black children seeing, before they could talk, that, their parents considered themselves inferior. Innocent black children – growing up, living out their lives, dying of old age - and all of their lives ashamed of being black.”

It is only armed with a true knowledge of our history and culture can we assume our rightful position as an equal in the comity of nations.

san-kofa