Deconstructing Africa’s Detractors

Regardless of what is said, the destruction of African civilizations in the physical and now in the historical records is an ongoing enterprise. There is a mental tool kit that the African student needs to engage anytime studying history. Because when history is reduced from all the pages to the underlining conclusion, we find regardless of if the author is British liberal, American conservative, or Australian the conclusion is the same: Africa has fostered nothing the Western World considers artifacts of civilization. With few exceptions, this is the underlying summarization on Africa, the pathology of discrediting and take-away. Eurocentric scholarship would rather credit Arabs, Indians, Chinese and even aliens for the pyramids rather than native Africans. The real difference between the liberal and the conservative is that the conservative will control you by external mechanisms (sanctions/war), the liberal will control you by internal mechanism.(charities/missionaries, agenda setters). Both have an adverse reaction every time African agency lifts its head up.

My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint Dominque (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block for ever the march of the blacks in the world – Napoleon Bonaparte

Historically Africa has been forced into the narrow distorted Eurocentric prism. Thus to whisper the name Africa is to conjure up the darkest aspect of humanity. However, Eurocentric does not mean solely the views of European people, as many Africans are active agents in this contemptuous view of Africa. Ethiopia, the Jewel of Africa celebrating 1000’s of years of continuous history, has become a byword for drought. Uganda, the green lush heart of Africa is renowned for the notorious Idi Amin. Actually African history, according to Europe, only began with their arrival. Thus in linguistics we see terms like Pre-Colonial Africa, as if their presents in Africa’s 160,000 year history denotes an ‘AD, BC’ epoch. Africans went from Fulani, Fon, Asanti, Igbo, Baka, Mandika, Mursi, Amhara, to ‘black’, a single color. And as a color associated with evil and backwardness ‘black people’ had no history and no geographical home. All of this is not a reflection of opinions at the turn of the century, but views held today, taught and disseminated in schools, universities, books, and the like.

THE DOUBLE DOOR OF AGENCY

Christian history is African history (Axsum). The history of the World civilizations is the history of Africa. The history of Islam is the history of Africa (1st Hijirah, Sokoto, and Islamic Spain), you cannot divorced one from the other. The history of humanity is an African history. History and development didn’t happen in isolation of African agency. Slavery and Colonialism did victimized Africans but Africans are not history’s perpetual victims. Africans in antiquity had agency and made conscious choices which contributed to the development of humanity. In Axsum the course that Ezna took to make Christianity the state religion was based on his sovereign agency. Regardless of orientation, to believe Africans have been on the receiving any of other people’s whims is to denial African agency. Agency swings both ways and as much as it holds us accountable it also defines our station in civilization.

Africans must be agents of their own history and control the format, agenda, and placement by which African history and culture is taught, disseminated, absorbed and weighted. But this does not mean that it is okay to fictionalize history to react against academic racism. And for this reason the Maafa study is a key sign of the Pan-African paradigm-shift where the legacy of the African Holocaust on African people globally is studied within the framework of the natural history in which the Maafa occurred. The emphasis in the historical narrative is on African agents (African-Centred) but this is very different from using history to force modern-day racial concepts into past to score racial points. As sweet as it is to believe in the Sirius B Dogon or blame Arabs and white for every disease in Africa it serves no historical relevance in the face of hard empirical evidence. Stick to the sources stick to the facts. No volume of Youtube can change the fact that some of our ancestors betrayed us, that some of our historians feed us lies to build up our egos. Every generation must review and build anew in the spirit of those who have gone before. We must lay standards which stand up in the face of scrutiny. History is a poor comfort blanket for racial pride.

PATTERN OF EUROCENTRIC CONTEMPT

By careful analysis the European voice can be identified without seeing the face of the author.

• Isolating Africans they don’t like as oddities and not part of the general African mainstream.
• Using liberal whites who appear to agree with the African dilemma. Most of them are there to thwart agency by restricting the range and direction of change to protect their self-interest.
• Isolating weaker Africans and rewarding them with praise and using them to defend the Eurocentric position.
• The patronizing of African scholarship as childish and simplistic. Treating it as a Pseudo-history.
• Thwarting all complaints by saying Africans are “whining” and need to “get over it”, “stop finger pointing,” this is used as a blanket argument when they get stuck. Africans are therefore suppose to suck up and take their oppression.
• The need to maintain historical academic superiority even in absences of knowledge.
• The need to invoke paranoia clause and claim African people have a ‘chip on their shoulder.’
• To normalize slavery and racism as a human problem thus mitigating their historical domination in racist manipulation. To merge class into race as it suits them.
• To collapse collaborators, victims and perpetrators into one equally guilty entity. Thus the slave trade was one of equal partnership between Europeans and Africans.
• Make self-references to institutions they control: Such as the dictionary.
• To stipulate, while retaining economic and political control, that race is redundant and that Africans are hung up too much on race, while they continue to exercise racism and profit from this exercise.
• Abstract through expressed by the European mind is elevated to the whispers of prophets, while the same abstract through in the African mind is the utterances of the mentally insane.
• Never can an African be seen to display genius outside of European authority. ” Mr. X of Gabon is so smart; he was trained at Oxford .”
• They constantly set themselves up of the heroes in African history. Thus viewers relates more with the ‘poor’ South African reporter’s family forgetting Steve Biko, a hero and symbol of resistance, in Cry Freedom. David Livingston is also the savior of Africa he single-handed abolish all of the African/Arab slave trade.
• When no academic error can be found they seek technical errors such as spelling errors. This is also a sign of their desperation when intellect fails.
• Making references to Africans who share their perspective and thus electing these individuals as authorities. e.g. Henry Louis Gates (HNIC)
• To label those bearing information which serves in their disinterest as ‘anger ridden.’ Thus the African’s are over emotional and deluded.
• Always suggest the pattern of European domination is coincidence.
• Cite rare and exotic examples of African behavior, which suits their argument
• Make references to social generalization that they created via cultural domination and oppression; “most black people don’t see themselves as African” clearly a condition that Europeans were active agents in creating.
• They lean on human individual responsibility thus saying “no one put a gun to African’s head” and Africans enslaving Africans is the fault of African people. They neglect their participation in fostering and nurturing chaos between non-European people. ‘Blame reassignmen.t’
• Straw man Character assassination to shift the topic away from the areas that they do not want to discuss. The deliberately obfuscating issues in order just to confuse the topic at hand. Example, they try to show Mugabe’s inhumanity in a conversation about European economic domination of African countries. Or that T Martin and Farrakhan are antisemitic and hence nothing they say can be trusted, even when it is factually true..
• The labeling of non-mainstream ideas as extreme and radical.

Pan-Africanism allows for progressive learning, borrowing and upgrading without tarnishing the inherent uniqueness of Africa. If we understand Pan-Africanism outside of the sanitized rainbow nation the AU sometimes paints. We need to speak truth to the historical record. There is no mystery of the vector or agent at the core of African’s problem. No African person invited apartheid, slavery or colonization. But those causing the problems naturally are not responsible for solving them. African people cannot allow themselves to be the fodder of humanity and this is where agency becomes key. Africa must use Pan-Africanism to create stronger boundaries which protect the interest of African people. So we must understand while Europe has imposed slavery etc that it is the responsibility of African people to remove it by any means necessary.

Africa has birthed us and has been a loyal Mother, through the worst Holocaust in history, through the new genocides and still when the word Africa is whispered we remember the Kings and Sultans of old who roamed this land, defining civilization and all the glory we have and are yet to inherit.

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