Africa has suffered so many indignities and insults. One of them was the supposed discoveries that we were suffered to learn in our elementary school days. The most offensive to me being the story of how Mr Mungo Park discovered the river Niger. We have rivers in my home toan. As a child I used to stand by these waters watching our people do their normal things at the river or stream and wondered how the white man discovered these natural things in our land. I see folks washing clothes, some fetching water, some fishing and many others doing several chores our folks do in the river. I used to ask myself, Where there no people there like my village people, washing and fishing when Mr Mungo Park got to the Niger, Did he not come from the sea. Was the river like our own not very far from the sea. How did he get to the river so as to discover it, without having been there before? These questions bothered my young mind.
Now, I sit back and marvel at the arrogance, impudence and idiocy of these colonial jokers, and I shake my head.
However, what gives a sort of kick is the end of the Mungo Park discoverer story> Some said that is his blundering in ran into rapids in a place called Bussa and drowned, while some said he was killed by some natives. The second account sadly gives me some morbid kick. At least it proves that he had run into some owners of the land in his adventures and they were not ready to take the white man superiority crap.
Maybe, he was a good man and his journey and intentions towards the Africans was honorable. But with the adventurers arrogance of those days and the colonial masters protection over them, there was no worthy intentions our forefathers experienced. However, it is on record that he was a doctor, yet when he got sick he ran bat to Scotland, meaning he did not know jack about the native Africans physiology and our traditional health system.
But the greatest insult is that these colonial over lords forced this trash upon us as kids. Everything good was attributed to them. Then unfortunately for them, their wars happened and the Africans had to HELP them rescue themselves from themselves. It was then the Africans saw white folks that were cowards, drunks, crazy, plain stupid and of absolute low societal echelon, and like the children’s rhyme goes They stood in their shoes and they wondered. This was one of the occurrences that totally and absolutely demystified the white man and made the African take another look to discovered that they are human beings. That their shoes are not part of their body, that they have toes like normal people.
Our grandfathers who went to these wars now tell us the stories to debunk these fallacies. My rascally uncle went to London and stood by river Thanes and declared, I have discovered this wonderful river, glistering in the white of the snow over it. I hereby name it River Eziama.
it was treated as a joke, as we now treat the story of Mungo Park as exactly what it is, A joke
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These are the relics of Mr Parks adventure to West Africa. The dilapidated state is an indication of the disdain with which these kind of History is held by these strong natives whose story of their land and its natural resources is warped by these colonial adventurers.
