Is there really anything to celebrate?
I will tell you a story – no, a joke.
The village drunk after a night out at the café decided to take a short cut home, through the village cemetery. Funnily that was the same night two village rascals chose to raid the apple orchard near the cemetery. They had after their escapade decided to retire into a freshly dug but of course yet unoccupied grave to share their loot. So as our village drunk was approaching, he heard as from inside a grave from his drunken perspective, one for you and this for me. Our friend, very scared as he had reasoned that this must be the devil sharing out the souls of sinner to his cohorts started creeping away. Suddenly down in the open grave, one apple rolled away from the lot – so when our village drunk friend heard “oh, and there is one trying to get away”; thinking it was him that was being referred to — you make your own conjectures at what he did next —.
However, the main gist of this story is not on our village drunk, but on the sharing – one for you, one for the bwana, one for the chief, one for the oga — and the rest for me
In the year 1885, the German chancellor, Von Bismarck called the leaders of the European and other western powers and gathered. The reason was the balkanisation of Africa. This inhumane act inadvertently led to a dark period of colonisation in the history of the continent Africa. Erstwhile societies and communities that had shared values and sociology were thrust apart and forced into different and diverse political regions. Meanwhile, peoples that have nothing in common in languages, culture, tradition and even religion were forced together to exist as one entity and very strange political bed fellows.
The disdain with which this act was perpetuated is reflected in the names or rather labels that were imposed on some of these new-fangled regions; no attempts were made by these sharers to brand these their newly acquired territories with dignified names. No, instead one region is Niger-area, the other Gold Coast, another Upper Volta while another is South Africa, while the other is Southwest Africa, the other Central Africa Republic (Happily most of them have reverted to more acceptable African names),
The greatest beneficiaries of these colonial manipulations in Africa are the French and the British. Between these two they controlled or control above ninety percent of these colonial creations. Out of the sixteen or so countries of West Africa, the British had or have five, including Nigeria, the most populated black country on earth, while the French has about nine or ten.
This is the story of the fifty-two countries of Africa and her peoples. While the British at one end were perpetuating their “Indirect Rule” the French at the other end branded their own their own style of exploitation “The Assimilation Policy”
In the sixties of the last century, there was a choreographed mass scramble by these colonialists to get out of Africa” many schools of thought have presented many theories on the reasons for this mass retreat. However, that is not the reason for this write up. The question is that it is about sixty plus odd years later, and one looks back and asks “Is Africa really out of colonialism? After seventy years or thereabout, has she shed the shackles of oppression of the downpressors?
When one looks at the economic situation of Africa, the theory that African was forcibly introduced into the present world economic order, after a lot of indignation, starts sadly to look true.
Africa sixty years and above of supposed freedom, powerful countries like Nigeria still go cap in hand to their past colonial masters for subversions’, subsidies and other sort of welfare gratuities and pittances. The mass exodus of the brains and labour force of Africa to the Western countries is a proof of the power of the pull of the invisible or visible string which still attaches Africa to her colonial dehumanising past.
Whether fact or fiction, it revolved round the media world some years ago that the great Ghana applied to the Queen of England to come and recolonise them. What this writer read however (whether fact or fiction) was the insulting and most degrading reply from the Queen of England to the leaders of Ghana. The letter was an out right rejection of this appeal. They have to first put their tattered house in order before England can consider touching them again.
It is understood even in elementary economics that a collection of buyers can easily determine the cost of their commodity, but the economic situation in Africa has totally defied this theory. Some say that the power of the contemporary economy revolves on the wheels of oil, but that has not proven true in the case of the oil countries of Africa like Nigeria. She is among the first eight of the greatest oil producing countries of the world yet among the first fifteen poorest nations of the world. OPEC remains a buyer’s-controlled organisation. Meaning that the wealth of these African nations is still owned and controlled by their colonial masters.
The proof of this is that Petroleum was discovered in Oloibiri in Nigeria in the year 1956 yet every one knows that the reason for colonialism was to garner wealth through taxes and other available means of exploitation for the Crown Government, yet the British knowing the wealth and power of oil scampered out of Nigeria four years later –in 1960.
So, no matter how the coin falls, the African loses and the colonial master wins – a case of “Head we lose, tail they win”
This also leaves one with the question of if they have truly left, for the truth is that what they came for which is the wealth of the African is still there. As it is obviously not the fire power of the resistance of the colonized that pushed them out and of course no integrity in them to have played a conscience game here.
So, one asks again, after sixty plus years, as there are still vestiges of the exploitable nutrients in Africa, have the colonialists left?
The answer of course is very clear, up to date, the greatest and most powerful players in the petroleum scene in Africa are still the oil out lets of these supposed departed colonial countries– AGIP (Any government in power), Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Chevron, BP and others still control the wealth of these supposed independent African nations.
Ghana, the great Gold Coast, should consider herself lucky, for truly poverty is better than death. Every other country – from Sierra Leone, to Liberia, Congo and South Africa which have gold and diamond have had their land deeply drenched by the blood of the sons and daughters of the soil. The largest diamond market in the world is in Belgium – a country that does not have one square meter of dug up soil that contains any trace of diamond. Yet in this great Antwerp diamond market there is no single evidence of an African shop, not even a kiosk. Yet the gold and diamond are still being mined, and the people of these African lands are still in and out of wars, deeply in poverty and totally impoverished and not one, no not one of the sellers of the diamonds in Antwerp have ever been accused of “Blood Diamonds”
So, the question is “Who is in charge of the wealth of Africa?”
In the political scene – the British for example had come with their Indirect Rule – this means that any leader of any community that questioned their authority – like King Jaja of Opobo, Nana of the Ishekiris, Oba Ovaremi of Benin, Shaka of the Zulus and many others – was brutally exiled to distant places. In their place was created a concept which the British called the Warrant Chiefs. A village rascal who is willing and ready to do the wills of the white master was promptly given a staff of office and the title of “Chief”. His main assignment – extort money from your people by any means imaginable. A chieftaincy system that has haunted and hounded the traditional African sixty years after the British are supposed to have gone. For these titles, the glory and assumed respect thereof, men and women now resort to every sort of criminality and wickedness.
In the greater political scene also another rascal is picked and imposed upon the people with basically the same instructions as the ‘Warrant Chiefs’ – “Any means imaginable” This is the advent of the Stay Put despots and the MARLBORO (Many African rulers love boasting of ruling others) syndrome that has plagued Africa for the past Fifty years. Some of these rulers stay there until they die, while some even hand over the political seat their children. The colonial over lords that entrenched them of course find the situation of an African country president staying in power for twenty years as quite all right. Not until the despot start fidgeting and start starching away some of the stolen people’s money for themselves and reneging on the agreement to send the loot to the masters or disobeying the orders of the colonial masters that put him in power, he is promptly branded a brigand and the colonial propaganda machinery will go into full scale operation, painting the disobedient rascal every colour imaginable.
This political miscreation and anathema of course led to the emergence of another aberration that has tormented the African continent since the colonialists packed and retreated – This is Military in Politics. The truth being that most of these military boys and girls who continued interfering brutally in the politics of the African states were trained by these colonial masters in places like Sandhurst. Their training instructions seemed simple – Take over whenever the installed political stooge is not behaving as agreed.
The religious sector has not fared any better in this imbliglio. The colonialists had embarked on their escapade with what was famously dubbed the 3Bs power – Business, Bullets and the Bible. The African says that the colonialists had given them the Bible and asked them to close their eyes for prayers, when however the prayers were over and they opened their eyes, the Africans still has the Bible while the colonialists have taken over their land and all they possessed. And that is how it is up till date – Sixty years later.
Now the Africans have brought back the Bible to those that gave it to them only to find out that the edifices build in the name of this religion have become derelict and abandoned monuments used more as landmarks and for tourist attraction and entertainment than places of worship of the one true God. When the Africans now preach the same sermons that were taught them by the clothed preachers from across the sea, the reaction is overtly disdainful – as if to say – how can you play on us the same trick we played on you more than sixty years ago.
Sadly, they do not know the truth.
Socially the scene is quite pathetic as the African has virtually given up everything that identifies him as a people for the western style and ideals. We have given up our beliefs, and culture, way of dressing, tastes and cosine, the way we speak, think and act and even our names for our colonial master’s ways.
A stanza from the poem Encounters says
—pull down the shrine
Put up the pulpits
Yours is base
Ours is genteel —
In the stifling heat of Africa, you will see an African all dressed up in suit and tie, sweating profusely from head to shoes and trying to his other inconvenience and ridicule to look western. You will even see certain Africans with butlers in long tailed coats in their mansions.
When an African behaves in this ridiculous method –we therefore say he is suffering from Kolo mentality.
Sixty years after our claimed independence, a typical African is totally western, except for the color of his skin. Even in the sports arena, a reasonable number of the athletes and sports men and women circuiting the tracks and fields of the western world are Africans. Alas, most of them now claim these western countries as “my country” to the deprivation and even sometimes to the detriment of their true mother or is it fatherland.
An ex American President was asked many years ago if he had not been an American, which other country of the world would he have loved to come from, to the shock of the of the listening world, boldly pronounced – Nigeria. When asked the reason for his choice, made this statement after explaining that a reasonable number of the black scientists in the Silicon Valley are Nigerians but Alas, they ain’t going home no more, and in summary of all the woes that have befallen this great nation, a microcosm of the fate of all the African nations after they claim that they have shaded the shackles of colonialism he said
‘Never in the history of the world have a people endowed with so much natural and human resources suffered so much indignities in the hands of a few’
The sad truth therefore is that after sixty years of supposed nationhood our encounter with the colonialists only introduced election malpractice in the shadows of the democracy they gave to us, military interference to this political system, religious intolerance as part of the religion they brought to us, avarice, greed, corruption, bribery and robberies, ethnic wickedness and wars as integral to the politics they dumped on us and fled. In the social sector, moral decadence, drugs, human trafficking, prostitution and every sort of nefariousness that were not known before colonialism now reign supreme in Africa.
A Belgium radio talker said over the air waves “Cut down the tall trees” and like wound up automations – Africans in Rwanda picked up every kind of weapons of wickedness and the most inhuman genocide of brothers and sisters on each other occurred.
The deluge of African leaders to Western countries to starch away ill-gotten wealth, the loot derived from the bloody exploitation of their people is increasing with every government rigged into office.
The continued exodus of Africans from all works of life, negligent of class and birth to western countries, the risks and dangers they encounter in this effort, to seek a supposed better life, cannot be recounted.
Therefore, once again the question is – Are we decolonized after fifty years? Do we have any justifiable reason to celebrate?
Let the reader draw his/her conclusions.
