By La’Niyi Africa
Africa was the cradle of mankind and civilization with complex social organizations and a sophisticated economic system for their era (Meredith 2014). The rise and fall of African civilizations and the ordeal that followed point to the danger of a fragmented effort to protect Africans from newly emerging global powers.
The emergence of global capitalism and the technology that facilitated distant explorations and massive expansion for fortunes left societies like Africa’s vulnerable and weak. This gave rise to uncontrolled and devastating exploitation of the African labor force to feed into the agricultural production and processing system.
The African was forced away from his home and increasingly became an object and considered as less human to be possessed by others, and those remaining in the homeland remained weak and vulnerable. This was not only exploitation but complete reconstruction of the very idea of an African as an inferior race.
This extraordinary crime and those who officially perpetrated it largely remain unaccountable for the grave crime against humanity. The legacy of this brutal crime remains to exert its negative influence on Africans for generations.
Simply put, the effective management of the resources of a community or system is economy. Thus, to almost say that economy does not exist in Africa since the political independence of the continent cannot be called a lie.
This is because the development of the continent is not in commensurate with her resources. Yes, Africa is rich, beautiful, and great. But the mismanagement of the resources by Africans and exploitation of the same by former colonizers has crashed Africa’s economy and prevented her development.
The structures of and for development can only stand firmly on a robust and strong economy. Good and effective management of economy will definitely produce good and viable development. Behind every towers of the “super nations” are “super economies”.
The “super economies” that have been facilitated by the resources of Africa. The resources of Africa which are the major instrumentations in realizing the economic growth and structures of the “super Nations”. Yet, the structures of Africa are in dilapidations. It is so ironical to find Africa “the world Bank” of every resources that anyone can think of on the planet Earth experiencing her kind of underdevelopment while her beneficiaries are seriously developing almost at Nano seconds.
There is never a better time than now to change the narratives with the same agility, radicalism, and with genuine intentions of the founding fathers. Chinua Achebe said; Africa’s postcolonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves. We have also had difficulty running the new systems foisted upon us at the dawn of independence by our “colonial masters.” Because the West has had a long but uneven engagement with the continent, it is imperative that it understand what happened to Africa. It must also play a part in solution.
A meaningful solution will require the goodwill and concerted efforts on the part of all those who share the weight of Africa’s historical burden (there was a country page2). The narratives of Africa have not been as it is today if not for the detour the continent took courtesy of slavery, colonialism, post colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism which are the offsprings of the Berlin conference of 1884 – 1885. The storms that betide the development of the continent of Africa was orchestrated by the greedy elements of that Berlin conference.
That conference was the greatest conspiracy of all-time. The conspiracy that targeted the resources of Africa by all means and treated Africans as lesser beings. The territories established after the Berlin conference in 1884-1885 served the interests of the colonial powers well.
The administrations they set up were not interested in the genuine development of an empowered local populace; they were there to ensure the flow of raw materials to the mother countries or to provide representation and organizational capacity for the white settlers who were encouraged to colonize the new territories, in the name of developing them, and to civilize and Christianize the native people.
King Léopold II of Belgium is a perfect character of what the intention of the Europeans was and still is in Africa today. Leopold formally acquired rights to the Congo territory at the conference of Berlin in 1885 and made the land his private property.
He named it the Congo Free State yet he held Congo with iron-fist hands and with the whips of a heartless slave master, he ruled and held the peoples of Congo (Africans) in bondage which the nation is yet to recover from till this date. Leopold’s regime began various infrastructure projects, such as the construction of the railway that ran from the coast to the capital of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), which took eight years to complete.
Nearly all such infrastructure projects were aimed at making it easier to increase the assets which Leopold and his associates could extract from the colony for their own glory. The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, while simultaneously eliminating most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance.
During this colonial time, the economy of Africa was re-arranged to serve Europe and Europeans, and the European industrial chain began in Africa and ended in European industrial warehouses. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, our lives begin to end when we become silent about the things that matters.
Thus, Like Cheik Anta Diop, I dare to say that the ‘Black world’, far from being an ‘insolvent debtor’, is the ‘very initiator of the “western” civilization flaunted before our eyes today’. the negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans’ was the ‘mental murder’ that paved the way for physical genocide in Africa.
The outside worlds have tried to shut us up from always referring to the Berlin conference, the slavery, and the hardship of colonialism. But these are events that Africans will always remember and refer to as the Genesis of the underdevelopment and dehumanization of Africa and Africans.
We cannot but always make reference to them. It is very pivotal in the history of Africans. Whenever we remember and mentioned them, it is not to keep wallowing in the blame games but to see them as catalysts and provocative enough to charge us to change this destiny that has been designed for Africans which is not in tandem with the purpose and plan of the creation of Africans.
One thing is certain, Africans are not created to be oppressed, exploited and treated lesser. The story of the great Mansa Musa, Kakande Amanirenans are just few among many and it is not a myth and neither is the fact that the cradle of world civilization is Africa. Africa as a continent may be the creation of man but Africans are not and the latter is what the colonizers are yet to come to term with.
They cannot come to term with the truth until Africans become the bona fide owners of their own destinies and not subjects of exploitations and specimen for experimentations. We must create our own systems. The type that suits our geography and persons in adding colors not just to Africa but for the world to once again learn at our feet just like in the past.
The truth is, as much as I am not an advocate of coup d’états in Africa, at this point, the military cannot sit and watch these things because it affects them too. You are your first human being before you are a soldier. They cannot be defending the integrity of a nation that is not ready to defend itself and is putting them on undue pressure. As I conclude this piece, I concur with the human right activist Falana (SAN) when he said; “We should save our country from neo-colonization and imperialism, especially Nigeria because of our status in the comity of nations. We need to study our society and know why we are where we are.
Let’s wake up from our slumber and develop our country and continent.”
