Africa: The Loudness of Empty Drums

The reason I use a lot of Yoruba proverbs on this blog is that I not only find them fascinating and rich, but I also use them like the instructional materials that I had in my formative years.

Let’s check this one: Bí àkúrò bá ń pariwo, ó ti di pé kò sí ohun tí ó kù nínú abà. It means that the drum is loudest when the barn is empty

Think thus: The louder the ceremony, the emptier the store beneath it. The English say, empty drums make the loudest din.

Anyone who has sat through an African independence anniversary - the brass bands, the borrowed or loaned antiquated jets screaming overhead, the medals glittering on chests of bemedaled Generals who have never fired a bullet, schoolchildren drafted to march in scorching sun to celebrate sham independence - will recognize the proverb instantly.

As I have written ad nauseam, our continent, Africa, has become a continent of magnificent drumming over empty barns. It is one where high-faulting rhetoric has replaced performance.

This is not a new affliction. It is, in fact, an inversion of everything our ancestors understood about power. Long before Westphalia gave Europe its treaties, before the Enlightenment gave it its lectures on liberty, the Yoruba had already built a civilizational architecture around one uncompromising standard: a king is only as good as the yam in the barn, the safety of the road, and the peace that lies over the land. In times past, only the people’s happiness gave the king contentment.

Let us look at another Yoruba proverb: Ọba ti ba kò bá lè dáàbò bo ilú rẹ̀, kì í ṣe ọba mọ́. A king who cannot protect his town has already ceased to be king, whatever crown still sits on his head.

Our ancestors knew what they were talking about. The Oyo Empire did not become the terror and the glory of the West African savannah through eloquence. It became so through a formidable cavalry, through the building of granaries to feed its enormous armies and ever-growing population. It did so by building roads that Yoruba traders could travel on without fear. The Benin Kingdom did not awe Portuguese visitors with lofty speeches alone; it awed them with its bronze-making wizardry, its walled capital that was larger than contemporary London, and with a formidable administrative machine that ran the Kingdom’s bureaucracy.

Traditionally, our palaces were instruments of the people’s welfare. Our people were never furniture arranged to flatter the palace.

Modern Africa has inverted this so completely that the inversion now passes for normal governance. And, as we have wailed so many times in this blog, we have normalized the abnormal.

Look closely at what our contemporary political class actually produces after sixty years of self-governance. Instead of stable electricity, our people are served only declarations about electricity. Apart from Kwame Nkrumah, who attempted to build Ghana on a solid industrial base, the rest of the plantation supervisors we have had have only issued communiqués about industrialization.

Why are we Africans not affronted that our continent, with more arable land than all the other continents, remains the world’s basket case? Why do we not feel ashamed that pictures of our adorn every poster on poverty? Why do we not challenge leaders who produce only task forces instead of food security?

All that our well-educated and very eloquent misleaders have built, with real competence, is an economy of narrative with plenty of bureaucratic jargon; zero delivery on all the things that matter to citizens.

In most of Africa, colonial flags came down over sixty years ago. Our colorful flags went up amidst drums and wild pageantry. Nkrumah thundered with confidence: The Black man can manage his own affairs.

Now, since the flags came down and our own flags went up, we have had sixty years of parades with little to show for the confidence that Nkrumah reposed in us. We have hospitals where diagnosis is often a formality before death, since there is nothing to treat with. We have schools that certify without educating, so efficiently that their finest graduates spend their final semester filling out visa forms for Toronto, London, Dubai - anywhere with reliable electricity, potable water, and reliable internet services.

In most African countries, the electricity grid, that first and most basic signature of a modern nation, still flickers on and off like a nervous oracle, unable to diagnose a knotty problem.

Nigeria’s national grid collapses with a regularity you could set a calendar by. More recently, Ghana has begun to deliver its own instructive lesson in darkness.

One begins to suspect that blackout is the one public service our governments have truly mastered, delivered nationwide, without fail, free of charge.

And yet the same shameless leadership boards a plane to New York, Paris or Geneva, dressed up in their moral vocabulary of a wronged civilization, lecturing assembled diplomats on justice, on reparations, on the unfinished business of empire.

African leaders have become the geniuses of theatrical absurdities.

These misrulers never learned that diplomacy has never yet turned a turbine, and that a standing ovation in Davos has never refrigerated a single dose of vaccine in a rural clinic in Kaduna or Kumasi.

Frantz Fanon named the mechanism decades ago, and, sadly, Africa has spent those decades proving him right. Fanon warned that colonialism’s deepest theft in Africa was not land, though it stole enough of that. It was the theft of political and psychological imagination - the deliberate cultivation of an intermediary class whose entire function was administration on behalf of a foreign owner, never transformation on behalf of the people beneath them.

The colonial flags changed, and the District Commissioners have packed their bags and left. Unfortunately for Africa, the psychology of the plantation overseer did not sail home with the colonialists. It moved easily into the governor’s residence and has made itself ultra comfortable.

Unlike the Chinese and the Iranians, we in Africa did not dismantle the plantation administration in 1957, 1960, or 1963. We Africanised it, gave it a national anthem and other appurtenances of modern states, and called it independence.

There is no other explanation for Africa’s governing class that can be so articulate abroad and so grossly absent at home. Plantation’s overseers were never meant to build; they were to keep the estate quiet.

Our comprador elite have learned to keep the estate quiet and the shipments of our raw materials moving under a flag of their choosing, and to call the arrangement "sovereignty".

Let us call these men and women what the elders would have called them: plantation supervisors dressed in agbada and Savile Row suits, who have mortgaged an entire continent’s tomorrow to keep their standing invitation to dinner with “friends” in Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing.

These misleaders are at their most effective when they fly business class to sign away our lithium, cobalt, and gold at the very moment the world finally needs those strategic minerals badly enough to pay a sovereign price.

Having signed away their national patrimony and banked their 30 pieces of silver in foreign banks, they will return home to a longish motorcade and a lavish state banquet, congratulating themselves on “attracting investment,” while the terms of the attraction are decided everywhere except in the interest of the people of Africa.

Whichever way we dice it, a leadership class that signed agreements where it receives 5% royalty (not even equity) for foreigners to extract its resources and dress the absurdity in the language of partnership, and then beat its own citizens for objecting and protesting, is not governing a nation. It is managing a concession on behalf of absentee owners, and drawing a comfortable commission for its trouble.

This is why the current scramble for Africa’s strategic minerals is not merely an economic story. It is a civilizational one, wearing economic clothing.

Lithium beneath Ghanaian or Zimbabwean soil is not simply ore. It is the next industrial century, still asleep in the earth. Cobalt in the Congo is not simply a commodity line on a mining company’s balance sheet; it is the precondition for the batteries, the electric fleets, the energy transitions that wealthier nations intend to build whether or not Africa industrializes alongside them.

Any government that signs its wealth away cheaply, without insisting on processing capacity, beneficiation, and technology transfer, is not only not behaving like a sovereign republic, it’s behaving like a distressed household selling the family’s heirloom to finance another month’s rent.

It is grateful for the immediate cash but indifferent to what the grandchildren will inherit tomorrow.

The justification now, sixty years running, is that there is no alternative. We are told the lie that Capital is impatient and that investors require certainty and speed. We heard this when gold left. We heard it when timber left, when cocoa left, when crude oil left in tanker after tanker past communities that to this day cannot rely on a lit bulb at night.

In Africa, the commodity, exchanged for a pittance, changes with each decade. The surrender, remarkably, does not.

The Yoruba have a proverb precisely fitted to this absurd pattern: Bí ọmọ ènìyàn bá ń tà ogún bàbá rẹ̀, ó máa ń pe ara rẹ̀ ní oníṣòwò; ṣùgbọ́n àwọn àgbà mọ̀ pé ó ti bẹ̀rẹ̀ sí í di tálákà - when a man begins selling his father’s inheritance, he flatters himself that he has become a trader; the elders know he has only begun his descent into poverty.

Every “landmark investment agreement” announced with fanfare on the evening news should be measured against that proverb before the champagne is poured.

Too often it is not a deal. It is the latest installment in a very old liquidation.

Our grievance against the historical crimes of enslavement and colonial plunder is real, documented, and unanswerable by any honest historian; what we do not understand is Africa’s politicians mounting foreign forums, thundering holy fire about yesterday’s crimes, which sound hollow when they allow the same crime to continue under new guises and names.

A government that denounces colonial extraction in a UN speech on Tuesday and signs an extractive concession on unfavorable terms on Thursday has not honored its ancestors. It has insulted their memory twice in one week.

It is engaged in the meaningless performative theatrics that Fela famously called: “Shakara Oloje.”

Unlike the stupid lies our plantation managers tell us, our own lithium, our own cobalt, our own gold on terms that reflect their true worth, have patiently lain on our grounds for millions of years already; they can wait a further generation while we build the engineering capacity, the technical universities, the political discipline to extract them on our own terms.

As both Iran and China have proven, foreign expertise can be borrowed without the nation being sold along with it.

Africa’s misleaders should remember that history does not remember the standing ovation; it remembers the child who could not study because there was no light to study by. It remembers the farmer whose field went unirrigated while resolutions were passed in air-conditioned halls a continent away.

No nation has ever industrialized on the strength of foreign applause.

Until Africa’s governing class relearns what its ancestors never forgot, and that is: The throne exists to serve the yam barn, and not the other way around, our so-called independence will remain the illusion that it has become: an annual masquerade, gorgeously costumed, magnificently drummed, and utterly hollow at the center.

The flag will keep flying at full mast, the anthem will keep playing, and the speeches will keep growing more magnificent by the year.

And the drums will keep getting louder, precisely because the barn stays empty.

©️ Ọdọ́fin Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan, Ọdọ́fin I of Kasoa)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com

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