Maravi

(HERALD ZW) The sorrow of a manipulated people

The sorrow of a manipulated people
Wednesday, 10 October 2012 22:23
by Reason Wafawarova

Posting her thoughts on an Internet social network, writer Petina Gappah had this to say: “My friend Nick Twinamatsiko has pointed out that no African has ever been in contention for any of the Nobel Prizes in science. I am not surprised.”

It takes men of exceptional brilliance to make it into coaching the biggest soccer clubs in the world, much as a soccer coach has to be stupid enough to believe that what they do is such an important thing in real life.

It is like believing that the Nobel Peace Prize is an important arbiter for the success of Africans.

You have to command an outrageous sense of gullibility to believe that kind of egregious nonsense.

A people shorn of the past, blind to the direction towards the future and uncertain of the present cannot tell from where they are coming and to where they are going.

European hegemony has for a long time hypnotised our people in Africa, and we have even reached a catastrophic stage where some of us are convinced that our past is gone and forgotten — that way making many of our people lead a life of meaninglessness.

We have a people so hypnotised by today’s world order that they have no idea why they are on earth, no sense of purpose whatsoever, and are totally unaware of the meaning of life.

This is the legacy of colonialism in Africa, and the legacy of neo-colonial Western hegemony in our post-colonial era.

A loss of one’s history is a loss of one’s past and essentially a very dangerous manipulation of one’s time dimension.

It is a sordid warping of one’s time, resulting in the warping of his perception, leading to a distortion of one’s experiences and his sense of choice.

Those who colonised us deliberately and strategically played with our history and our sense of time.

They intentionally displaced us so as to manipulate our sense of place, so they could distort our identity and what we are about as a people.

They made us trivialise our history while they elevated their own history to be an essential part of a body of knowledge they coercively installed in our minds, naming our countries and cities after their own dead ancestors, and telling us our own dead ancestors were demon-possessed pagans.

We were made to believe that there was only one way to India and that the way was discovered by Vasco da Gama, and as young school pupils we were made to sing this vacuous myth until it was embedded in us as the truth.

Only the white colonisers had the power to discover things and that is why David Livingstone discovered the Mosia Tunya Falls before he “appropriately” named them Victoria Falls, and the people around the falls could not have discovered the natural wonder since they themselves were also discovered by Dr David Livingstone.

Our lack of ambition and innovation is not a genetic phenomenon.

Rather, it is a result of an annihilated past, a battered present, and a misdirected future. With no future in sight, our people will inevitably lose identity, and will euphorically feel no need for motivation or anxiety — being content to depend on the benevolence of those who exercise hegemony over the continent’s resources.

The mentality of the European after the Medieval Ages has been that of expanding the future, spreading white hegemony pursued on the backdrop of cancelled fears and a sense of self-fulfilment, all at the expense of the lesser peoples of this world.

Colonialism might be counted long forgotten by those of us obsessed with the rhetoric of moving with the times, but it almost indelibly robbed us of our past, bringing us into a semi-infantile state — and in our dilated past we have become an inhibited people.

We have a political leadership in Africa that is legendarily catatonic when it comes to development policy.

Asked by the BBC’s Brian Hungwe on what his idea of empowerment of people is, Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said: “You empower people through education, jobs, and through gender support . . .”

[How about ownership of the economy? - MrK]

Surely the education and jobs created by colonisation did not, from any angle of imagination, empower any of our people in Africa.

Rather the education helped annihilate our past, destroy our culture, and moulded out of us very loyal labour tools for profiteering capitalists, and whatever jobs we got empowered only those who employed us, providing to us slave wages.

Dr Bernard Aaronson of the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute made the following conclusion about the past, present and the future for any people: “Life must carry some sense of direction, from past to present or present to future, to seem worth living. People given a present shorn of a past and future become preoccupied with death and behave like schizophrenics.”

Is it a coincidence that our poverty-stricken people’s major fear in life is death, and that unscrupulous traditionalists and religious prophets manipulate so much this fear of death to control and exploit these vulnerable people?

Even Western hegemonic powers manipulate us so immorally on the basis of the poverty that wreaks havoc in our communities.

The colonial legacy is used by the West today to hypnotise Africans by manipulating our attitude towards our past, that way manipulating our consciousness, our capacities, and our collective abilities. We are not only bound in a state of illusion of who we are and who we must be, we are also victims of memory problems.

Our lives have become somewhat meaningless because the only institutional memory we command is that of experiences given to us by a colonial legacy we purport to have conquered, and many times we have serious problems getting the real meaning of life.

Western hegemonic powers are aware that by manipulating our past and present, they can easily manipulate our collective mentality, our sanity, and our contact with reality.

We sadly underestimate the power of history in the shaping of societies. The colonisers made sure they prevented the teaching of our history in a correct manner, that way ensuring that our collective potential will perpetually be undeveloped, and that we will forever depend on those who exercise economic hegemony over us, with some among us calling themselves revolutionaries for fighting to preserve white hegemony over Africa’s economy.

The logic of employment today is elevated as a higher priority to the idea of establishing an economy, and in the name of employment all radicalism to shift African economies away from the control of Western capitalists has largely been derided as ill-thought policy, and sadly we have Africans who support this cowardly rhetoric.

For us to use the intellectual knowledge base in Africa for the development of the continent, we will need a major paradigm shift.

As Amos Wilson asserts: “Alienated knowledge can only be used in the interest of aliens,” and that is why we aspire to work for those whose history has been sold to us as the definition of success. We have countless higher degrees in business administration across Africa, and yet we have no idea whatsoever what it means to build a business, unless we are building it on behalf of a Western investor.

Our resources in Africa are pillaged every single day because we have allowed other people to stall our creativity. We basically lack in coping skills and that is why we believe so much in interventionism and we compete to have Westerners lead the way of our economies in Africa. We feel better when we call it globalisation.

Africa is the richest continent on this planet when it comes to natural resources. Yet we enrich Western investors, the Chinese, the Indians and other people from outside the continent, and we pride ourselves as champions of promoting Foreign Direct Investment.

Our continent supports other racial groups, feeds their children while our own children starve and die at a rate of about 2 000 a day, and those who survive are destined to dire poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, or become robbers and petty thieves, and do all sorts of things we do not approve of.

The usual cry of the African political leadership is “We need money!” It is as stupid as that. Africa is not suffering from lack of money. That is the most stupid thing one can ever say. Trillions of dollars are realised from Africa’s natural resources every year, and yet we have African economists foolishly telling us that the continent is suffering from money problems.

Africa today is suffering from the absence of an economic system, and money is not a system. The continent lacks the pattern, the system, and the organisation that is needed in the building of an economy.

An economy exists prior to money, and this is why it is important to fully understand the policy of indigenising the economy of Africa.

This is why it is important for every Zimbabwean to see clearly the vision behind the economic empowerment policy as pursued by Zanu-PF.

Morgan Tsvangirai does not agree and his reasoning is very simple.

“Why must I agree with the policy of another party?”

This is what he asked the BBC’s Brian Hungwe in response to a question during an interview he gave recently.

Morgan Tsvangirai needs to be reminded that there were economies in the world well before money was invented, and that, in fact, we do not necessarily need to have money in order to establish an economic system.

We need to establish an economic system that will create money for Zimbabwe, not necessarily to have money that will create an economy for the country.

Foreign direct investment creates an economy in the interest of aliens, and such an economy may create tax revenue and wages for locals, but it can never make meaningful money for the country.

When we create an economic system owned by local people, we begin to make money for the country; and this money is only a fruit or a consequence of what is really needed — an established locally controlled and run economy.

The only reason Africa has so many resources and yet remains direly so poor is that the continent has no economy of its own.

The economy of South Africa is foreign owned, and that is why there is both a supposedly huge economy and money in South Africa, and yet the indigenous South Africans are languishing in extreme poverty.

South Africa will need to establish an economy for its people and that way money will come the way of black South Africans. Malema has it accurate when he advocates the takeover of mines and farm lands by indigenous South Africans.
Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

* Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.

Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, REASON WAFAWAROVA

posted by MrK @ 3:56 PM