West African Predicament

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Therefore, there is a great need for a new historiography of the African race by the African people themselves, not a history that is based on the adventures of Europe but that is instead premised on life of the African and the very things that characterize the essence of their being. Philosophy is literally the love of wisdom.

Thus, those responsible for the teaching of such disciplines in universities are always in a hurry to limit their findings to the beginning of philosophy as bequeathed to them by the Europeans, all in the bid to justify a failed deduction whose conclusion having been made, must necessarily be supported by every premise, not minding the wrongness of such foundation. Since the West therefore began its study of history with an epigram that Africa is without history, progress, and development, every study therefore must tend towards proving the said statement. It had therefore been wrongly pre-established from the onset that it was impossible for the task of philosophizing to have been done in Africa before the advent of the West.

And because sometimes people misconstrue history to be the study of the past, the past for an African always begins with its plunder by Europe. Their notion of slavery takes their mind back to Africa and to the black race in general, without averting their minds to the fact that some other races outside the African race were also colonized. The history of Africa must and can only be rewritten by African scholars, as the history of a people that predates the existence of the white man on African soil.

But this is possible only within a reinvented mind. It is worth noting that students were being instructed by the Egyptian priests before the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great of Greece. It was within this period that the libraries in Egypt were converted into research centres by the school of Aristotle. The philosophers and scientists of this period, apart from the studies they received directly in Egypt, were also beneficiaries of the invasion as citizens of Greece.

It is therefore not surprising that these philosophers were always victims of the Athenian government that always persecuted them because of ideologies that were alien to the people of Athens and were then considered unacceptable. How did they then arrive at a conclusion that ancient Greek philosophers, who were vilified for importation of thoughts that were alien to the Greek world, were actually the inventors of those ideas?

The history of the life and thought of many of these prominent ancient Greek philosophers is filled with contradictions that can only be solved when we resort to faith as the arbiter of everything. Aristotle, for instance, who studied under the tutelage of Plato, became a great scientist while his tutor was a known philosopher.

The fact that a philosopher could turn out a graduate in the sciences proper can only be resolved mysteriously. That Plato could keep Aristotle for a period of twenty years, tutoring him of that, which he is ignorant of himself, becomes questionable. It is therefore noteworthy that although Aristotle studied in Egypt, he made a library for himself from books that were carried from Egypt by Alexander.

Plato who then studied philosophy and learnt the ten virtues in Egypt, from which he developed his own four cardinal virtues, could not have been the tutor of Aristotle James, , This fiction continues with the fact that Theophrastus and Eudemus had studied physics, geometry, astronomy, arithmetic and theology all under Aristotle. The idea that different persons could at the same time specialize in different disciplines, some of which are distantly related, under a single tutor, is only acceptable in societies where myth is equated with reality.

The fact that even the birth date of Thales is in contest bears semblance with modern day history in some societies where illiteracy makes it impossible for people to give a precise date of birth of their kindred, yet we are made to believe that this struggle among the Greeks is common with literate people. Even the positing of water as the foundation of everything that exists, or an indeterminate substance, including the theory surrounding fire, air, and so on as the primary stuff underlying everything, had long been held as a debate in Egypt; it is needful also to mention the famous Socratic dictum: Since the foundation they build on is held tightly with litany of lies, it may therefore become impossible for their house to stand.

People should not also forget that the history of the Greeks, during the time which the Greek philosophers were engaged in their so-called philosophical thoughts, was filled with wars and counter wars, which anyone would be quick to tell that it would be a misnomer to conceive of great intellectual strides in war-ridden areas of Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and so on.

However, it was normal for the Greeks of the ancient period under such violent and unstable conditions to be engaged in serious academic discourse. Nevertheless, like the origin of humankind that is written in favour of the white race: The Copernican revolution used to characterize the achievement of Immanuel Kant in philosophy is another case in focus. While the name is derived from the heliocentric movement of the earth around the sun, as proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16 th century, the ancestors of the Africans in Egypt had long held this heliocentric discovery in Egypt before Christ was born B.

The very notion of the miseducation of the African people takes people to the question of identity crisis. One of the features of identity is the fact that it bears a relational character with that very concept, which a thing is identified with.

To speak of an African identity is to have a character that is truly African and such character is not individuated, as it is shared among the same species. When a people have no identity that is uniquely theirs, they crave for any form of identity and because such identity comes from without and not within, it denigrates a people to a second order position. Because Africans carry an identity that is alien to them, there is an inbuilt inferiority complex in them. Hence, it does not matter whether they think, or feel that they are inferior or not, the inferiority is created by the existence of such institution that denies a people an identity that they can rightly call theirs.

But this deliberate inferiority complex that is institutionalized has an aim, for it leads to dangerous brainwashing that further leads to self-erosion, shame, and self-alienation. Its negative impact is very broad since it erodes the relational character which identity seeks to create Oguejiofor, , The war on race therefore creates a false biological determinism that makes people think that nature has endowed some races better than others and made them superior to some others. In terms of achievement, a Negro has no identity of his or her own, but they see themselves through the lens of another.

The colonial masters knew this very well; they had to destroy the foundation that made this relational character possible. For instance, the slaves in the United States of America had to be disconnected from family ties to make revolution impossible, thus destroying their loyalty system.

Awoonor gives a vivid account of this identity crisis as it was and is still exemplified in the lives of the black individual. It all began with the history that was taught to the black individual and the various myths about the African race.

West African Predicament (Paperback)

The oppressed were taught that Africa was a land of barbarous instincts and primitive ties, where the consumption of human flesh featured prominently. The African therefore came to learn that civilization, modernization, and exposure are defined in terms of a total disconnect from African culture. This then went a long way to create an internal phobia for blackness, especially in the African-American and by such attitude, the African-Americans had phobia even for themselves. They were therefore programmed to be ashamed of their ancestry and should therefore count themselves lucky specimens that were dragged out of their homeland in chains.

Being a lucky specimen, the best that could happen to the African individual is that he or she was merely worthy of observation. But the danger inherent in this type of specimen is that it is treacherous to that which is under observation, not minding whether the outcome is either positive or negative since it is still an instrument to be used, even if it is of a meritorious type. And because the debate on who is and who is not rational is the foundation of all racism, the colonial masters were in a hurry to justify the thesis of Hegel, that Africans, being a people without history but paradoxically have a history of darkness, it was illogical to conceive of them as a people with reason.

They could be therefore worthy of slaves, but they must be slaves of a different kind because of their incapacity to reason, slaves of a subhuman kind that could have neither will nor freedom. Any attempt to bestow on them any knowledge that only humans were capable of grasping would be a contradiction of their irrationality.

What is most pathetic is that slavery has taken another form that has bestowed on the Africans the position of reformed serfdom. In colonial times, most slaves never saw their masters do some field work, they came to equate work with slavery while the ability to live in affluence and not work at the same time was equated with lordship. Many people of the black race therefore struggle to acquire material resources, which for them are synonymous with freedom. This is a distortion that was learnt from the colonial masters.

It is worthy to note that the circumstance under which the masters acquired wealth was totally different from the thinking of the slaves. Having utilized their brains to exploit the resources on the African soil, the Europeans lived in a way that the oppressed saw as ostentatious. But since the oppressor was physically present in Africa temporarily, such exalted lifestyle was meant to shield them and their associates from the public in order to guarantee security.

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The oppressed having been physically free, must now struggle to live in such a gigantic way since the presence of the colonial masters on the African continent suggests that to be free, a person must be wealthy and wealth in this sense proceeds from the materiality of resources.

Since the gorgeously dressed slaves who served the slave masters were the envy of fellow slaves, the black individual now equated elegance to being a master. Thus, even after the physical chains have been let loose off their arms and legs, they must still struggle to appear like the slave masters. Eventually, this desire to always look like the slave master always reminds them of their position as slaves that they truly are in their current thinking.

While the blacks who can actually afford such exorbitant way of life end up as celebrities who must perform to the admiration of the masters and their households, what therefore was done under duress during colonial times due to the fear of being killed is now done willingly by those, who once oppressed, now take such acts of performance as a profession Akbar The oppressed, therefore, moves around with the illusion that they have the mind of the master. It is a clear indication that they are far from freedom. To be ultimately free, they must understand that wealth proceeds first from the intangibility of resources, which can only be acquired from decolonizing the mind.

This was the clear-cut difference between the slaves that were prevalent in African society before colonialism and those introduced by the oppressors. In pre-colonial black Africa, slaves were in hierarchy; however, even in their hierarchical status, they were slaves of a human and not a sub-human kind. Masters, therefore, never exploited their slaves should the occasion arise since they were of different social status; while slaves exploited slaves, those of a higher social status exploited each other Diop, , 6, This is not to downplay the role of the African in this whole predicament because when greed sets in and African leaders began to sell fellow blacks to Arabs, it opened a new page in the undermining of the identity of the black race.

African leaders became more enthusiastic in the lucrativeness of such trade. This template was to be followed by the Europeans when they seized the task of enslavement from the Arabs Williams In all of this, there is still an inherent irrationality in the psyche of the conqueror, which is the fact that there was a victor. Victory in this sense arises from battle or struggle and a people must be in contest over an event or issue with certain rivals.

No people need to claim victory over another as long as the preys are not armed in any sense to fight the predators; what the predators ought to simply do is to invade and not merely conquer. Victory for the conqueror should only be a natural result of the irrationality of the prey. However, this was not taken into consideration in the denial of rationality thesis to the African people as argued by the Europeans.

But even the scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century was not without its own resistance. A people who have been brutally handicapped by the stroke of the pen should therefore be allowed to carve their own destiny and not be compelled to engage in a race with the rest of the developed world.

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The whole concept of religion is not a coinage of the supernatural, but a formulation of humankind to bring the human person closer to the consciousness to the supersensible. The Christian religion becomes a victim in this research because large parts of Africa were colonized by nations that opined that salvation comes only through the Christian route. Thus, one of the criteria for slavery was the fact that a people or a nation was unchristian. Religious authorities operating under the form of religious tyranny gave permission to every nation in Europe to reduce every person in Africa to servitude who never accepted the Christian religion.

Not minding the form of religion being practiced by a people in Africa, its basis of reducing an entire race to the level of animals was the fact that they believed in the Supreme Being in a way that the Europeans did not believe. The justification for the enslavement of the African people was further given a biblical foundation. Was it therefore not a preconceived coincidence that the bible, which was used as a tool for colonialism, was given to the black individual with various verses that endorsed slavery as a divine order? It would be incongruous, and a deliberate denial, that has its foundation on irrationality, to conclude that the idea of religion was unknown to the African people before the emergence of the white individual.

History, however, has revealed that there is virtually nothing that is found in Christianity that is new to the human person, except for the untrained mind. Since the African people had a vivid knowledge of the supersensible before colonialism, there must be reason s for the establishment of an organized religion as imported into various colonies.

When we go through the various mythologies surrounding the concept of death and the afterworld of the Bantu people of Africa, the Masarwas, the Ashanti, the Nandi and Wabende peoples of East Africa, and so on, we would understand that pre-colonial Africa did not only have organized religions, but it also had an elated form of spirituality. Thus, when Lightfoot and Ussher Jackson 5 announced that the creation of the world dates back to B. This is because a careful study of history shows that the 13 th dynastic period of the African race predates the failed thesis of the existence of Adam and Eve.

When even history records about twenty-five pre-Christian saviour-gods, all born of virgins Jackson 38 , the whole project of Christianity and its subsequent projection of the white race and the quick rush to vilify the black race is an indication that raciality and distortion are found in scripture. When even scripture is used by the oppressor to project whiteness, then it becomes evident that Christianity came in the first place, not primarily because there was a messiah to be advertised to the Africans that the conqueror wanted the oppressed to be beneficiaries, but because it fosters economic manipulation of the black race.

Christianity, which therefore teaches that the end does not justify the means, uses its own end as a guide to all other means. This is seen in the use of the Babylonian baal to promote the Christian religion, while at the same time condemning such practices as pagan Jackson The worship of baal is therefore wrong in Christian theology, but the legend of the Babylonian Bel is right for propagating of Christian ideology. This use of double standards in Christian doctrine is the very standard that is used to condemn traditional religious practices in African society while at the same time using the myths of the same African religion to justify Christology.

Black becomes demonic while white is used to represent everything that is honourable. It therefore leaves them amazed that while the image of God and his angelic hosts are Caucasians, the pictorial representation of the devil is black. Those who conceived this notion never averted their minds to the fact that even the devil was part of the angelic hosts before the supposed fall from grace.

If everything evil has a black tag, did the devil who is the architect and bearer of evil turn black after the fall, or was he not Caucasian while he was among the angelic hosts? This Christological chauvinism has always been used to cage the African mind in a box, where slavery is justified in order to condemn everything that is African.

It becomes laughable that almost everyone who encounters the divine in a vision always sees the heavenly hosts dressed in the racial colour of his or her oppressor. This gives them more reasons to justify godliness in their oppressor, while at the same time perceiving godlessness in their fellow black individuals. And since the person who controls your mind also controls your destiny, in this battle for ideological control of the civilization, the African civilization risks extinction. Since extraction was the primary driving motive of the emergence of Christianity in Africa, one could therefore go into a church building in the guise that minds are being renewed.

The African Predicament

Where are Africans in all of these? They end up being nothing better than emancipated slaves. By this emancipation, slavery was transformed but not eliminated. An emancipated slave is one who is given the privilege of carrying the Lockean secondary quality of emancipation, while at the same time neglecting the fact that being a slave is the primary motive that makes a slave who he or she is; he or she is therefore nothing better than an exalted servant. Emancipation then becomes a profound adjective used to glorify a treacherous noun slave. It is therefore evident from the above that Christianity and other various forms of worship, apart from being kinds of religions, are also ideologies, and like every ideology, one of its main features is to make it sellable to the masses.

Real emancipation of the African would not be possible until every trace of Caucasian association with divinity is unveiled. This does not also require its substitution with black pictorial images. Freedom is not freely given, for it is always demanded with some form of revolution. In this predicament that faces the African people, the task of regaining humanity does not just lie with those whose humanity has been stolen, but also with the very persons who stole them.

Dehumanization makes some persons beasts while regarding others as sub-humans. So both the beasts and the sub-humans are under a form of distortion, and they must be transformed back to a human state. This is very vital to the idea of wholesome decolonization because both the oppressed and the oppressor are afraid of freedom, for while the former fears being free, the latter fears losing the freedom to oppress Freire, , Although Africans recognize the ills brought upon their colonies by their masters, the future of the African continent largely depends on the possibility of getting Africans who will drive a community-based ideology as against the egocentric lifestyle that led to its downfall in the first place and still puts the continent below other world powers.

Lamentations must therefore be shifted from the West and centred on the role Africans have played over the years in the financing of its downfall. There is need for a rigorous reconstruction of the landscape of the African mind. This cannot just be done by mere bodily repatriation of Africans abroad but by the repatriation of the African mind. Isaiah Aduojo Negedu Email: The African Predicament The African predicament is a concept that explains the aggregate of plights that threaten the African people. Introduction The concept of the African predicament is a holistic one that can be viewed through various lenses depending on the approach es that scholars decide to begin their debate.

Various Dimensions of the African Predicament One of the greatest challenges Africans have is the location of affirmation of their true identity. Mis-education of Africans and the Falsification of History i. Why is the Study of African History Necessary? It creates a sense of self-identity. History creates identity and in creating identity, it also distorts identity.

Through historiography Africans can engage in the study of European history without knowing that these are mere projected myths of the reality of the African people. Hence, they can be reading history about the African people while at the same time giving credence to another race without knowing that such stories have African roots. Socio-Political Role of History: Sometimes we ask ourselves: The question they need to ask themselves in this regard is: People who have faint knowledge of history are more susceptible to manipulation than those who are knowledgeable in history.

Since the study of European history is not at the centre of the high school educational curriculum, many Africans are persuaded into believing that the study of their own history is not worth it. For example, a church building is a historical event so too is a bank, and this is an indication that even if individuals from the Caucasian race do not study their history, they still live with and see such historical edifice on a daily basis.

History is, therefore, not only written in books, but also becomes an unwritten piece as it is lived daily. It is the past and the future all embedded in a mobile present. If it is indeed true that a creator made the universe and gave humankind the power to name things, then by having such power, humans also had dominion. There is a relationship between naming and dominion, between naming and reality. When a people then relinquish to others the authority to name and define, they permit them to have dominion and control over their being; therefore, there is a close relationship between dominion and history, as history, when actualized, guarantees dominion.

Philosophy and Western Historiography Philosophy is literally the love of wisdom. Culture and Identity Crisis The very notion of the miseducation of the African people takes people to the question of identity crisis. Religion The whole concept of religion is not a coinage of the supernatural, but a formulation of humankind to bring the human person closer to the consciousness to the supersensible.

Conclusion Freedom is not freely given, for it is always demanded with some form of revolution. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery. Mind Productions Associates Inc. It gives an account of mental decolonization of the black race. Michael Joseph Ltd; It is a summary of the plights of the African race from numerous perspectives. Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Send us a new image. Is this product missing categories? Checkout Your Cart Price. Together, they enumerate the challenges they encounter in a totally different culture as they minister to the "poorest of the poor" in a third world nation.

They describe the difficulties of the mission life they live. Coping with the lack of the usual western amenities, struggling with the constant threat of malaria and other tropical diseases, homesickness for family and friends become a part of their daily existence. The story of their projects to improve the lives of the women, crippled children, hospitals and schools are interesting and imaginative. Understanding and co-existing with the dominant customs of their area, especially the "Voo-doo" influence becomes an exciting challenge.

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