AFRICAN, THINK FOR THYSELF!

"He who fails or refuses to think for him/herself leaves his destiny in the hands of those who do the thinking for him."

The call for the African to think for him/herself sounds quite insulting since it presupposes that he does not think and therefore is a fool. Far from it! We are not fools because we are capable of rational thinking. What it rather means is that the African has left the most crucial determinant in the success or otherwise of his life in the hands of others. People who I might add have demonstrated to us time and again through their words and actions that they have not the least interest in our welfare.

So the question is why we have relegated this all-important function to others. Have we ever bothered to ask ourselves why God gave each and every one of us the capacity and capability to think? If God in His infinite wisdom felt that others doing the thinking for us would be okay, would He have bothered to give us all brains in the first place?

Now why do I even say the African is not thinking for him/herself? Simple. Just look around you and you will find that the opinions that we have formed about ourselves and others particularly the Caucasians and the consequent decisions we have drawn based on these opinions were not done independently. These have been shaped by Eurocentric views of the African and his customs fed to us formally through their schools and churches and informally through movies, newspapers and magazines. So for instance, the Caucasians through movies and "My book of Bible Stories" have made the African believe that God is "white" and Satan is "black". However, a "small" thinking on the part of the African would have revealed the falsity in this account. Do they not claim that all the heavenly hosts are "white"? If so, then is Satan who was an archangel also not "white"? Or did he become "black" just after rebelling against God?

Again, we also harp on the Eurocentric tune that they introduced education in Africa. But the mere fact that in the ancient West African empires there existed prestigious universities like that of Sankore and Jenne before the advent of the Europeans should have exposed this naked lie yet we have accepted this line, hook and sinker.

Thinking involves using the mind in an active intelligent way to form connected ideas and reflecting on them to solve one's problems or improve upon existing solutions. This also involves casting one's mind forward i.e. anticipate an event or situation and also recalling and reconsidering things in the past. Honestly, can we say we have been engaged in any of these activities? Is it then surprising that we have become mere spectators in the scientific and technological advancements the world is experiencing in spite of the fact that we have universities of science and technology? Again, is it any wonder that we have come to rely on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (I.M.F) "experts" to come up with solutions to our problem in spite of the numerous economic dons in our institutions of higher learning?

Well, any right thinking person should be able to come up with solutions to his basic problems simply because most of these problems are man-made and what man has done, man can undo.

One of the causes that I have identified for our inability to think for ourselves is our laziness. Believe it or not, we are a bunch of mentally lazy people. Laziness as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is unwilling to work; doing little work or showing or causing a lack of energy or activity. Mentally, that is what we are: unwilling to think; doing little thinking or showing or causing a lack of mental energy or activity.

What then is the cause of this failure (or is it refusal) to think for ourselves? I am of the view that centuries of the Caucasians providing us with "superior" goods to satisfy our wants and needs is one factor. Having already been brainwashed into believing that Caucasian products are superior to ours, they by extension are mentally superior to us. We have therefore surrendered this job of thinking to them since we have somehow imbibed this notion that no matter how hard we try we can not match them so why not forget about it. After all, they would come with the "best" solutions.

However, the irony of this view is that when you ask the African if toe-to-toe the average Caucasian is wiser than he is the answer is an emphatic NO. You probe him further as to why then he is unable to do what the Caucasian is doing for him/herself i.e. the provision of his wants and needs, then comes the flimsiest of all excuses: we don't have the machines. Look, we better get certain facts straight! Machines are not manna that fall from heaven from which we have been excluded. People, people we claim to be equal to in the endowments of both body and mind, invented them. They did so by thinking, using the active intelligence of their minds. So we better put on our thinking caps and start doing likewise.

The formal educational system cannot escape blame either for our failure to exercise our mental faculties. This is so because the education being provided us does not allow students to come up with their own creative ideas. What rather happens is that students are made to absorb and reproduce (chew and pour) what they have been taught. The end result being that we have students graduating from our institutions of higher learning who can spew out everything in their fat textbooks but cannot come up with simple practical solutions to problems related to their field of study they are confronted with. What kinds of graduates are we producing? Probably Bob Marley was right when he said we were graduating thieves and murderers. After all, are they not the ones we entrust leadership positions with, and do they not end up licking our coffers dry or fomenting civil strife by refusing to leave office when their terms end?

Now more than ever is time to start some mental exercises for believe it or not we possess the mental capacity to do for ourselves what the Caucasians and the Mongoloids are doing for themselves. Only the person of absolute faithlessness in God can doubt this. For do the scriptures not say that God created all men equal? But just as God does not control a man's will power so does He not control what we use our brains for. All the time we spend on devising ways of bringing our fellows down could be channelled into how we can lift ourselves from this doldrums. In this regard, the ingenuity used in turning human meat into beef and mutton (if what they say about witches is true) could be used in coming up with practical scientific and technological innovations that would help improve our lives.

African, think for thyself or you remain a perpetual slave to the other races.

san-kofa