Lead yourselves out of the proverbial Armageddon people of Africa; we must conquer not the mountain but ourselves. We must understand getting ourselves out of mental slavery and economic poverty is a means to an end. A long-term strategy is required to put to a halt the lingering colonial hangover that has become a plaque in our ability to take ownership of our development. Most African communities south of the Sahara are struggling to see development and modernisation beyond Westernisation.
You know there are fundamental problems when what you perceive of outcomes of modernisation and development are other societies’ adaptations to their social, economic, and cultural needs, progress, changes, and improvements, and when self-deprecation is progress, when moving away from your social and cultural background is your concept of your development, and even despite obvious struggles to fit into that unaccustomed development framework you still insist on squeezing in.
Colonialism reshaped black people’s self-perception including how lowly we view our tradition and culture. People were stripped of their dignity and left aspiring to be white and possess everything Western, that is a fact, but it is a fact too that to break free from the mental slavery of colonialism is our responsibility.
To understand the characteristics of the modern African state, we need to understand its origins; the modern African state is founded on the governance architecture of its colonial predecessor, an oppressive, dictatorial state characterised by the suppression of a certain population group by another; it was almost entirely disconnected from the interests of the natives while driving the economic interests of the Western metropolitan.
Furthermore, modern African state boundaries served the economic interests of its colonial ‘owners’ not the social, traditional, political, and economic interests of natives; communities with little in common and whose relationship was characterised by damaging tensions suddenly found themselves enclosed within same state boundaries governed by foreign institutions and tools. The colonial state emphasised maintenance of law and order, not justice; obvious tensions among natives were ignored.
Postcolonial Africa did not review and address apparent governance structural abnormalities that oversaw the oppression of certain population groups and treatment of different communities as though they were the same, instead the new regime normalised it, only replacing victims and abusers. Governments of independent Africa did not take steps to rebuild states to meet the needs of the common African.
Real change in Africa will take place when we change the mindset. Truth remains that the man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind. Africa has reduced itself into a market of foreign values. Where focus should be on being the best version of ourselves, we are fixated on who among ourselves best imitates Western attributes.
Nobody doubts the importance of formal education, the concern however, is that it does not seem to be optimising the talent of the African. We have not prioritised adaptation of knowledge into local traditions thus, community level development programmes; there is clear disconnect between educational institutions’ product and local communities. When your education system is founded on a foreign design and foreign language is its major transmitter and when the ethos of the education programme is the detoxification of locals of their identity and impart ‘superior’ Western values you do not break mental strangleholds but create, in your society, an invaluable modern slave market for Western bidders.
When the evidence of being educated is being fluent in the English language and when having a taste of all things Western is a status symbol than a mere choice, you have a problem. Unfortunately, that is where most of Africa stands today. We do not have control of development processes because we have failed to picture development and modernisation through our lenses.
Failure to identify a place for our traditions and culture in the development and modernisation process is reason for failure to push our boundaries and create new challenges. We have become lazy, look in admiration at what other societies are doing, in the process neglecting local interest. Instead of learning from other nations and researching how our culture, beliefs and customs can be adapted and changed to help us face new challenges, we have gone for the easy option that says our culture, customs and beliefs are the problem and barrier to development, and the solution is the eradication of local customs and values and adoption of everything Western.
Africa of today is a gluttonous consumer of Western products; it glosses over the impact of betrayal of its traditions. We need to break the trend and engage with the world on a par not as beggars. Defining development in our terms will give us better chance to picture it and take ownership of the processes leading to it and then we can seek from the world the right technologies we need to accomplish our goals.
For its long-term prosperity and independence, Africa must reconfigure its mindset; modernisation and development must not be mistaken for Westernisation; technologies can be adapted to any culture and language; we must not allow ourselves the ignominy of passivity in a modernising global economy but turn our communities into massive sources of knowledge from which the global community will benefit. For modernisation and development strategies to work for us, we must participate in them; define them, create them on the background of our traditions and modern narrative strategies to approach different themes in society.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 