Africa has too many empty minds

While Africa had cultures beyond belief and of the highest achievement white people, especially in Europe hundreds even thousands of years ago were jumping from tree to tree. As we speak in Sudan ten million people are displaced, in 2017 after the elections in Kenya one thousand citizens were slaughtered and 250.000 were displaced. Somalia is in constant crisis and South African black leaders failed their black people for the past thirty years.

The Pharaohs asked for doctors from Mali to treat them and the richest man ever paid with gold while traveling the continent. Sciences were highly advanced but dust away in Mali covered by the sand of the Sahara desert.

Dreaming and thinking is for free no education is needed. Under the former colonial masters Africans were free to dream and to think, to envision a better tomorrow. Be it in public or in private. Did they start to be on the pathway of philosophy or only family and friends oriented for the time of their lives not beyond?

Besides satisfying basic human needs people who formed the elite of society used their spare time to think about the future, a future for their countries and beyond national borders as much as for their citizens and the role they wanted to play in the new tomorrow.

Before the catholic church took charge in Europe of the education of the political, social, and economic elite in e.g. ancient Greece Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle lectured their students, while walking around, the art of thinking as a philosopher. Together they looked at the moon asking themselves how it would be one day to pay the man on the moon a courtesy visit or fly like the birds in the skies.

Great philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Bentham, Bergson, Nietzsche, Aligheri, etc. still today have a significant impact on Western societies. The outfall of their thinking is very much visible in many aspects of life in the world of the white man. The French elite university Sorbonne produces annually the French elite. CEOs of big corporations are philosophers or Political Scientists. European countries promote philosophy as a vital overview of the nation's standing alongside the political decision-making process. Decisions that have a great moral and ethnic impact on society are discussed with politicians in public forums and are significantly directed to a better tomorrow for generations to come.

Great African philosophers like Oruka, Bodumin, Houtondiji, Wiredu, Keita, Towa, Serequeberhan, etc. are on the other hand part of African great cultures. Journalists, self-proclaimed intellectuals and politicians, or big businessmen of African descent have taken over the role of the great long gone heroes of thinking, thinking beyond the life span of a single human being. African elites think as far as of their death, not the future of 50, 100, 200, or more years to come. They have stopped dreaming or envisioning a better tomorrow for the African people. They leave their heads empty of good innovative ideas replaced by greed for fame and fortune.

To be a philosopher is a mindset, a form of character, and a standing in the middle of education. African countries don't promote philosophical education from the infant stage to adulthood and pension age rather focus on raising heroes of politics and journalism to address short-term problems with short-term answers. To change a society, be ahead of the other pack, and stay on top always requires people who dare to dream, have the intellectual capacity to translate their dreams into the form of a vision, and to finally become a remarkable hero set up a detailed action plan to bring the dream to effective motion and movement.

The current African elites know best how to criticize the current crises in Africa with loud voices. When looking behind their sharp dark brown eyes the space of emptiness opens up widely.