OPINION

This opinion was first published in the New Vision on May 5, 2023

Dr John W. Bahana (PhD)

In my last article, we shared the depiction of Africa and Uganda in the social media. First, I brought us all to speed on modern terminology surrounding the social media and its origins in the computer and internet age and the far we have come from.

Subsequently, I received many positive responses from readers and I was able to understand that readers wanted a continuation of the reviews, even if not on a regular basis. So here we go again.

I will start with a selection of posts from that most popular of social media, TikTok. This is an app that was launched in the year 2016 by the Chinese technology company ByteDance; and six years later it has hit more than one billion users, including Ugandans. Some posts are insane and worth the dustbin but that is the world we live in today.

There are hundreds or more posts on Africa and Uganda. So here is a selection worth your attention:

Do you know what a scam is?

So asks @clarityrevolution. This video clip posted on TikTok has a powerful message for us Africans that I wish to share with readers, especially those that may not have come across it. The presenter, unfortunately, is not named. But he is a black man that must be an American judging from his accent.

“A scam is having the Bible translated in every African language; Swahili, Zulu, Yoruba, and every other African language but having zero translated science books into a single African language. That is a conspiracy, that’s a trap. Someone who can be scammed with the same trick over and over again for decades upon decades is considered a fool.

And their gullibility and lack of critical thinking make them willing participants in their own destruction.

I have walked into different libraries and I have seen university science books translated into Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic and so forth. I have seen Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill translated into French and the Japanese version of A Man’s Search for Meaning.

I have seen the Arabic version of the Art of War. All these books, I have seen in various languages but none in any African language. An African child is sent to Arabic school just to learn Arabic so that he can read the word of his/her supposed creator. While the Arab praise and learn in his own language, African child learn and pray in other languages.

You will find churches in Africa where the English became preachers, but would have a native next to them doing the translation.

Here is where the scam comes and you will never find a school in Africa where a teacher will have next to him a translator for chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc, to the students.

I have seen many science books translated into various languages but none in any African language. The Chinese are taught mathematics in Chinese. The Japanese are taught engineering in Japanese. They are all taught chemistry, astrophysics and other subjects in their languages. The only book that Africans have had in their languages is the Bible and Quran.

The African is the wretched of the earth and the only member of the human race who has been brainwashed to think that his ancestors bequeathed him with a curse that has prevented him from attaining his goal and desires.

The white people don’t have terrible ancestors. The Arabs that enslaved Africans for 700 years do not have wicked ancestors. No member of the human race has wicked ancestors who have done terrible things.

In western world Christmas is the biggest festival. Christmas stemmed from both the Roman paganism and Roman cultures. The biggest festival in Arab world is Idd al-Fitr. The biggest in China is the Spring Festival. The Festival of Light is the biggest in India. Black people are probably the only human species on planet earth that helps other races celebrate their own festivals.

But nobody celebrates theirs with them. They generally believe their own ways are inferior. Therefore, it is hard for them to involve the beautiful things their ancestors left. He belittles ancestors who gave them life.

He will be treating himself in a foreign hospital or visiting another man’s country for religious purposes of praying to his own creator. The African calls another man’s history a holy book just because they told him it is holy. It is an abomination for him to see the world through his own culture.

A black man is roaming around the world like a tortoise without a shell. No one respects him. He is lynched in Malaysia, incarcerated in Cambodia; he’s shot like a dog in the streets of America. Not until we free our minds from mental slavery we will be wretched by the world”

“It is easier for a poor man to go to heaven than a rich man to go through the eye of a needle,” so says the Bible.

And here is an excerpt of a letter from King Leopold II of colonial Belgium to missionaries in Congo (now DRC), in 1883.

“Your knowledge of the gospel which we wrote will allow you to order the Negroes in any way you want, and it will encourage them to love poverty. Convince the Negro that the poor are happier and will inherit the heaven, and it’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. You have to detach yourselves from them and make them disrespect everything which they revere as sacred and give them courage to confront us. I make reference to their mystique (spiritually) system which is a threat to our conquest. You must do everything in your power to make it disappear. By all means the Negro must be made Christian, by only this way will they let go of their rich culture and everything they respect about themselves.”

And one reader commented thus: “May our ancestors have mercy and be patient with us. We have been brainwashed for more than 400 years. It is difficult to break free. But we will someday.”

The power of belief

As I write this piece, social and traditional media is awash of versions of the tragic events of Shakahola Forest near the Kenya coastal town of Malindi in which more than 100 people are dead, many buried in mass graves.

A high proportion of these bodies are children and smaller numbers are adult women and much less, men. The dead have been found to be victims of a religious cult whose leader, Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, has been arrested by the Police. Interestingly, Nthenge and his family did not practise what they were preaching: “Starve to death in order to go to Jesus.”

They ate ugali na nyama at every meal while their followers starved. In a BBC discussion of the Kenyan tragedy that involved a Kenyan academic and writer, I was reminded to note that victims of such cults are largely from poor sections of our society that easily fall prey to brainwashing with heavenly promises of better life beyond the horrid conditions that confront them on a daily basis especially in urban settings.

The writer is a widely travelled natural scientist