African patriots should not relent in identifying way forward
"Mere adoption of foreign economic models and acquisition of material wealth cannot develop Africa without internal transformation. The continent’s true development lies in building its own political, economic and cultural capacities through social awareness and organised effort," writes Magode Ikuya
Magode Ikuya. (File)
OPINION
By Magode Ikuya
Every object is blurred as it recedes away in the span of space and the distance of time. Consequently, apparitions which strike awe and curiosity when first coming into view lose their luster as the sight of them settles into the routine. Those that initially appealed to eager hands become less interesting, their early memories fading and drifting into oblivion.
Such, too, is the enigma of social phenomena. Our great ancestors, whose mastery of the use of fire constituted the pivotal foundation of today’s multifarious technologies, are not credited with the making of human history.
It is those whose greed galvanised them to apply newer devices, out of the use of fire, into conquests and enslavement of the world who are extolled for assumed heroic development of humans on the globe. The telling of history is embedded with falsified narratives to keep the enslaved tied to the pegs of their enslavement.
This is why anyone hankering for how Africa is to be developed must constantly dip into tracing the African situation to overcome the prejudices meant to keep African society in permanent subdual.
When we were first hearing of the struggle against colonialism, it seemed to us that the mere handing over of instruments of colonial state to duly elected representatives of the African population would resolve the colonial problem. But we soon began sensing strange waves as numbers of independent states got celebrated.
A contrary brand of state leaders thought that colonialism could be uprooted only by echoing “nationalisation of means of production”, a stanza of the hymns sung from models of the then Eastern Europe.
In the din of much ensuing fracas and hiccough across Africa over the years, the failure of attending to unresolved social riddle soiled further even the diminishing few existing water points. Out of desperation from growing social crisis, it became a chorus that the only way to develop Africa was to embrace a “liberal” economy, a euphemism to ingratiate wholly with the mercies of foreign capital and its ways.
This made most African states openly concede to a sole role of a prefect answering to the designs of global capital. Thus, development is misconstrued; it is assumed that the swagger and acquisition of more cars and goods of the supermarket is development.
If, out of deep pity and pious love, the colonial world had become so charitable and philanthropic as to dish out everything required for the life of Africa instead of being enslaved, there would still have been no possibility of development of Africa.
Even with the pockmarking of the continent with glamour and sparkles from the rich world, the imagined heavenly bliss of Africans idly reclining in hunger-less domicile from all worldly worries would still not have produced a developed African society.
If Africans only received life as gifts from others, their implied inactivity in the history of building their own lives would deprive them of envisioning their social aspirations.
Mere imbibing of outside mass without improving own capacities is social imbecility, a condition of infirmity resulting in inevitable surrender to the foresight of lurking roguery of others.
This is why we have always stressed that the basis of salvation for African societies is the upsurge of its own social awareness and activity.
Any glaring absence of internal self-transformation by Africans makes a mockery of any claim of development.
African patriots must continually study and disseminate how colonialism operates. Then, they must devise appropriate ways of delinking Africa from absorption.
This must aim at igniting systematic organisation of society to build capacity in politics, economy and culture for the rebirth of an African society.
The writer is the State Minister for East African Community Affairs