Covid-19: Questions on my mind

First, a quotation from the classic on Negro Psychology, “The Miseducation of the Negro,” by Carter Godwin Wilson: “If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

If, by all the accounts, data, information, statistics we have on the Covid-19 pandemic, Africa is the region that is least affected, and Africans have registered the least fatalities from the virus, why then are African misrulers accepting dictations from Western vaccine donors, and copying the policies Western governments adopted to cope with their emergencies?

Let’s forget what Einstein told us about the madness of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes, shouldn’t elementary logic dictate that it’s the West that should come to Africa, as a supplicant, to investigate and beg to find out what exactly it is that have spared Africans from the predicted devastation?

A people with more humility than Westerners would have discarded haughtiness and racial arrogance and climb down from high horses to learn something from wherever a solution can be found, if the interest is to find genuine fix for a raging pandemic, instead of trying to continue to mong pharma-billionaires by selling heavily-marketed so-called scientific solutions which flew directly in the face of everything we know about science.

Why continue to use masks to combat a virus if, after almost two years, it has proved to be ineffectual?

Let’s learn more wisdom from Mr. Woodson: “History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.”

“THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro.”

“They are anxious to have everything the white man has even if it is harmful.”

From Prophet Frantz Fanon: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

Femi Akomolafe

January 4, 2022