Who Buried Ubuntu and Replaced It with Europe’s Endless Civil Wars?

"If the Negro is not careful, he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it."

The more one considers our case in Africa, the more the question of who bewitched us begs an answer.

Let’s consider this question: when was the funeral for Ubuntu held?

When and where did people lower into the grave that magnificent African philosophy which quietly proclaimed, “A human being becomes human through other human beings,” and replaced it with another imported ideological bugabuga stamped somewhere between Paris, London, and New York?

Perhaps the more important question is: why were the chief mourners Africans?

As we have said ad nauseam on this blog, there is a peculiar disease that attacks educated Africans and turns them into the most Zombified people on earth.

It begins with a university degree, develops into a profound embarrassment about everything indigenous, and ends with the patient believing that wisdom acquires legitimacy only if it emanates outside Africa.

To these fellas, Ubuntu was too ordinary, African, and damned too uncivilized.

So into the intellectual dustbin it went.
In its place came another beautifully packaged export: Europe’s latest quarrel.

We must admire Europe; it possesses an astonishing ability to manufacture conflicts, wrap them in academic vocabulary and persuade the rest of humanity that they are universal truths. They will then aggressively promote them to the level of praxis.

They will sanction and kill whoever opposes them.

Let’s take a look at history. Yesterday it was kings against subjects. Then came aristocrats against commoners. From there to Catholics against Protestants. Engels and Marx invented Marxism - capital against labor. The French coined the terms "Left" and "Right".

Now every conversation risks becoming men versus women, boys versus girls.

Europe appears incapable of imagining society except as permanent litigation.

Today, our overeducated and overcivilized Africans cannot imagine society rather differently.

We do not talk perfectly or romantically, just differently.

Lost on these over-civilized Africans is the simple fact that the Yoruba, for instance, hardly waited for a twentieth-century manifesto before women became commercial giants. The great markets of Yorubaland were not charitable gifts from enlightened husbands. They were economic republics administered by formidable women whose influence reached palaces themselves.

The institution of the Ìyálójà was neither symbolic nor decorative. Wealth, commerce and public authority were realities, not donors-organized conference resolutions.

Yet one sometimes listens to certain African intellectuals and concludes that African women apparently spent five thousand years waiting helplessly until Europe finally invented liberation.

As one watches African Feminists and self-proclaimed patriarchal-slayers spew Western-invented jargon, like well-trained parrots, one sees people who suffer from extraordinary historical amnesia.

These people are an insult to African civilization.

One wonders what our grandmothers, those women who raised families, negotiated markets, settled disputes, financed enterprises, and commanded enormous respect without first acquiring imported ideological certificates, would make of today’s fashionable vocabulary.

Would they recognize themselves? Or would they ask why their educated descendants now speak more fluently about European theories than African experience?

Now the big uncomfortable question: Has Africa become happier after importing all these fashionable ideological packages?

Have African families become stronger, or our communities become more cohesive?

Are African Children more secure today, and has public morality in Africa improved?

It appears that Africa’s greatest natural resource is not gold. It is wanton enthusiasm for borrowing foreign ideas and turning ourselves into their most grotesque caricature.

There is no other continent that copies foreign arguments with greater passion than Africa. No continent denounces its own intellectual inheritance with greater confidence, and no people produces more enthusiastic disciples of ideas whose original authors themselves continue to debate, revise, and criticize.

The tragedy is not that Africa studies foreign philosophies; every civilization should.

The tragedy begins when study becomes total surrender, when comparison becomes imitation, and admiration becomes intellectual colonization.

Ubuntu never claimed perfection; no civilization possesses perfection.

What Ubuntu offers is something increasingly scarce in the modern world: the conviction that society is a living community before it is an ideological battlefield; that duties accompany rights; that cooperation precedes confrontation; and that human dignity grows through mutual obligation rather than perpetual division.

Perhaps that old African wisdom deserves another hearing.

Or perhaps we shall continue behaving exactly as our colonial tutors predicted, waiting patiently on the intellectual docks for the next imported cargo, then competing to become its most enthusiastic sales representatives before asking whether it truly serves Africa’s interest.

©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FemiAkomolafe

Tiktop: www.tiktok.com/@panafricandigest