Africa: The prodigals’ return
As the world beheld the longest Blood Moon in 100 years on July 27, many people in Europe, America and Asia made a celebratory fetish of the event. Some camped out of town so as to have a clearer view of total lunar eclipse during which direct sunlight is completely blocked by the Earth’s shadow […]
As the world beheld the longest Blood Moon in 100 years on July 27, many people in Europe, America and Asia made a celebratory fetish of the event. Some camped out of town so as to have a clearer view of total lunar eclipse during which direct sunlight is completely blocked by the Earth’s shadow and the moon turns a red or coppery colour.
In Africa, the celestial wonder was seen in Lagos, Nigeria; Johannesburg, South Africa; Cairo, Egypt; Kinshasa, Congo; Nairobi, Kenya, among others. But the hoopla that attended the event in other parts was not noticeable here because people were busy wrestling with existential problems. In the unbelievably intractable traffic holdup in Lagos, where commuting from one part of the city to the other takes several nerve-jangling hours, the last place a commuter wanted to look was the sky.
An Indiana based preacher has warned the world that the Blood Moon is a sign of Biblical significance, no less. We are in the end times, he said. I chuckled, thinking, his message couldn’t possibly have been meant for Africans. We in Africa have been living in end times since colonialists interrupted our way of life, robbed us of the essence of our being and sold us the lie that the only way to development and happiness was their own.
I wondered who would be gazing at the Blood Moon in Congo where the hero of that country’s independence was assassinated in a US-sponsored and Belgian facilitated plot five decades ago. Prof Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja writing in the UK Guardian called it the most important assassination of the 20th century.
And what was it all about? Mineral resources! Lumumba was resolved to achieve genuine independence and have full control over his country’s resources for the purpose of improving the lives of his people. The colonialists would not surrender the pie willingly. Those were the days of the Cold War. Under the pretext that Congo’s rich mineral reserves would fall into the hands of communists if Lumumba’s nationalism was allowed full rein, they resolved to delete him from the landscape.
The Congo has known no peace since then. That assassination is now considered Congo’s original sin. The perpetrators and instigators of that crime are still presiding directly and indirectly over the mineral resources of the impoverished country which, had Lumumba’s roadmap been followed, would have been one of the richest countries on earth.
What is true of the Congo is also true, with minor variations, of many other African states. Imagine where Ghana would have been if Kwame Nkrumah’s seven-year development plan had been conclusively implemented. Since February 24, 1966, when he was overthrown, Africa’s Black Star has lost its glow.
Nkrumah advocated a form of philosophy he called “Consciencism”, a form of socialism suitable for underdeveloped Africa. Tapping from aspects of the three main traditions that make up the African conscience – the Euro-Christian, the Islamic, and the traditional African- Nkrumah declared that traditional African society was essentially egalitarian, and argued that a new African philosophy must draw its nourishment chiefly from African roots. The West branded him a socialist.
The first attempt to get rid of Nkrumah failed. A bomb was planted in a vase of flowers to be presented to Nkrumah, but his bodyguard had a good nose; sensing incendiary material, he wrestled Nkrumah to the floor just before the bomb went off. All the seven people standing close to the flower girl died. But Nkrumah sustained a cancer-laced wound that would eventually kill him in Guinea where he found succour after his overthrow.
Guinea’s Sekou Toure who became President of Guinea in 1958 was Nkrumah’s soulmate. His crime was that he advocated for Guinea those values which were peculiarly African [and Islamic and upon which the structure of African society rested. Colonial exploitation of Africa, he warned, not only robbed Africa of its resources but also mangled the basic values of the African society. Ironically he was fated to die in a hospital bed in faraway Ohio!
Nigeria is in a class of its own. The amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates by the British in 1914 could have been a successful experiment if the motive was altruistic and true nationalism was encouraged. But, thanks to the divide-and-rule legacy of the colonialists, we are a Babel’s Tower of 150 disparate languages and no nation. The basket of corn is unmanned and mother hen can feed fat.
We have allowed ourselves to be reduced to vassals of foreign political ideologies and their ways of life. No wonder, the Arab-Israeli war is being waged in many African countries through proxies garbed in either of the two Abrahamic faiths, Christianity of Islam.
Let the Blood Moon be apocalyptic for the delusional. To Africans, with the rise in White Nationalism and bare-knuckle racism in many parts of Europe and America, and resumption of slave trade in the Arab world, let it be a clarion call on all prodigal sons and daughters of the continent to return to our communalism, socio-economic structures, traditional education, mores and values through which philosophy we built empires in centuries gone by (recall that Portuguese explorers started trading with the great Benin Kingdom in 1485).
If China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea can prove that there are other routes to development than blind aping of the West, so can we. But first, we must get the political leadership right.