Failure by Africans to appreciate their being is the continent’s undoing

Respect for yourself shapes how you perceive and treat yourself, your culture and community, your physical environment, how you view and treat others, respond to the world around you, confidence to demand from it, and even more revealing, it instructs the world how it must engage with you. It shapes your boundaries of behaviour; the protections individuals and communities put in place to ensure safety and reduce risk to people and their immediate environment.

When black people start using their intellectual ability to define the world in their own image, they will respect themselves, project that to each other, develop compassion enough to protect black victims of race crimes, and other races will have little choice but to respect us. How we treat each other within the continent provides a workbook for the rest of the world on how to treat us.

Trauma from slavery and colonialism has been used to explain the ‘black men’s mindset’, dependent behaviour and a lack of development in Africa. While it is true that severe negative experiences elicit some unhelpful coping mechanisms from people, trauma should not be used as justification for toxic behaviours within black communities; once we became aware of the trauma, it became our duty to heal, that is accountability.

Instead of allowing colonialism trauma unfettered dominion over us, let us build greater awareness and commence the healing journey. Trauma is not the only reason for a lack of progress in Africa, a leadership obsessed with power for its own sake and personal reputation over character plays an even bigger role.  

Media control is essential; continued exposure to white supremacy through repeated exposure to Western role models in media and news leads to emotional resignation, increased disconnection with oneself, and a diminished sense of self-respect. This desensitizes blacks to stigma and causes them to become less responsive to real-world violation of their being, normalise stereotypical behaviours, and even contribute to a bystander effect where they are less likely to challenge abuse directed at their communities.

Accountability, and not excuses, is what we need from every leader and every citizen for change to happen; from the tiniest village in the continent to the largest country, people must own their challenges and solutions. If we cannot pay attention to the health of the smallest streams in the continent, we cannot be trusted with the responsibility of protecting the welfare of the largest lakes in the continent.

Facing facts, pre-slavery and precolonial Africa were not a garden of roses; as is the case today, the continent was not a safe space for the most vulnerable in society, women, children and the infirm. Different African nations and kingdoms engaged in protracted wars of attrition, and they often held unhelpful, dehumanising opinions of each other leading to a disregard of human rights and infamous enslavement and slave trade for wealth and power.

It explains why some Africans participated in slave trade; the participation involved individuals, kingdoms, and merchants who captured and sold people to both European and Arab traders, often as a source of wealth and power. Factors driving this involvement included pre-existing forms of slavery and a desire for economic gain, political advantage, or to expel enemies. Major kingdoms like the Ashanti Empire, Kingdom of Dahomey, and Aro Confederacy were heavily involved in capturing and selling people, becoming prosperous from the trade.

For centuries we have communicated to the wider world that we have no regard for each other’s dignity, but we have all the time and compassion for everybody else. Our complicit in slave trade is testimony; it sent the message to the World that we had no problems with the enslavement of fellow black people if we were not direct victims; we gave assurances to other nations that they can get away with enslaving other Africans, and the world took the offer.

Let us embrace the reality that the centre of gravity of our identity, dignity, and respect is our individuality first closely followed by our traditions, culture, arts, norms and values which must guide our local policies and decisions on international relations. We must not waste our time trying to prove ourselves to the rest of the World, to keep friendships, win admiration or salvage the World’s respect for us. The truth is that those who care about us will come seek the truth from us and those who do not and choose to make assumptions of who they think we are really do not value us as human beings. The moment we start trying to prove ourselves to people is the moment we let their notion of success or failure set our standards and determine our priorities.

What we think of ourselves has the power to restore our dignity. While we cannot ignore the trauma resulting from both slavery and colonialism, progress will be achieved via socio-political transformation that identifies and challenges unhelpful responses. We need more black models of our culture and traditions in the media; the education system must provide the clarity we deserve to understand how slavery and colonialism continue to model black people’s attitudes and choices, and trauma-informed interventions must be used to build culturally informed systems.