Myth About Africa’s Collective Amnesia

By PETER WUTEH VAKUNTA*

It is hard to take umbrage at a candid opinion expressed by a concerned African. In an article titled “Away with double standards” published in the July edition of Africa Today (2004:2) Emmanuel Yartney contends:

The developed nations of Europe and the United States are responsible for the acute hunger in the developing world because of their unnecessary interference in the governance of less powerful countries.

For centuries, Western powers have systematically destabilized Africa and siphoned her wealth through covert activities ranging from their roles in genocides, civil wars, the looting of mineral and land resources, and the overthrow of governments through mercenaries. Our readers may remember the case of Sir Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher. Mark Thatcher escaped a long jail term in South Africa over a coup plot a couple of years ago. As reported in the February 2005 edition of Africa Today, Thatcher's arrest by South Africa's elite police unit, the Scorpions, came months after the imprisonment of a group of mercenaries in Zimbabwe led by Simon Mann, and another in Equatorial Guinea, led by Nick du Toit. It later emerged that the two groups were part of a plot, allegedly backed by foreign governments, to topple Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the controversial president of Equatorial Guinea. Writing about this incident, John Dludlu, reporting for Africa Today(op cit, 18) stated that Mark Thatcher spoke to the media outside the High Court in Cape Town,”[…]after pleading guilty to charges of bankrolling an alleged coup plot in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.”

In another vein, the recent arrest of nine French nationals in the Republic of Chad charged with child kidnapping is yet another evidence of the meddling and evil deeds of Westerners and their accessories in Africa. According to Europe News (2007:1)

Six members of Rescue Children and three French journalists were jailed on Thursday on charges of kidnapping and trafficking in children after being taken into custody at the airport of Abeche, in eastern Chad, as they were preparing to leave the country with the children on a Boeing 757 aircraft.

They are suspected of wanting to take the children to France to have them adopted by French families. Chadian President Idriss Deby called the action of the French NGO Rescue Children “inhuman, unacceptable and unthinkable.” He said those arrested would be “severely punished”, according to Europe News. Rescue Children is a French NGO created by the association L'Arche de Zoe, which is run by firefighters in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil. A spokeswoman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Veronique Taveau, speaking in Geneva, said what had happened in Chad and the way it had been carried out was illegal and irresponsible and it had breached all international rules.

The biggest Western myth about Africa is that which regards the continent as one for the taking because of the presumed backwardness and savagery of its people. As Mudimbe (1988:40) has noted, such racist remarks speak neither about Africa nor Africans, but rather justify the process of inventing and conquering a continent and naming its “primitiveness” or “disorder” as well as the subsequent means of its exploitation and methods for its “regeneration.” Similarly, Lyons(1975:86-87)notes the consistency with which nineteenth century European commentators regarded Africans as inferior to Whites, quite often comparing the two peoples along the lines of children versus children:

Though they did agree among themselves about which European “races” were inferior to others, Western racial commentators generally agreed that Blacks were inferior to whites in moral fiber, cultural attainment, and mental ability; the African was, to many eyes, the child in the family of man, modern man in embryo. (Quoted in Booker, 10)

This mode of thinking provided a justification for European imperial conquest of Africa. It is interesting to bear in mind that the misrepresentation of Africa constituted a leitmotif in nineteen century European literature. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1960) is a good example of Western literary texts that paraded racist stereotypes about Africa. Conrad's novel depicts the entire continent as backward and primitive. As Achebe has pointed out:

Heart of Darkness perhaps more than any other work, is informed by a conventional European tendency to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.(Quoted in Booker, 13)

Like Heart of Darkness, many Western literary works about Africa are overtly contemptuous in their racist depictions of Africans. American readers are probably aware of the portrayal of Africans as savage cannibals in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan novels. But as Booker points out, these writers simply ignored the reality of Africans altogether. The truth of the matter is that the characterization of Africans as cannibals and Africa as an uninhabited wilderness where courageous Europeans could go on exciting adventures, served as justification for the European so-called “civilizing mission” to Africa.

As can be seen, Africa has been victim of Western denigration and exploitation for a very long time. Innumerable incidents, including the transportation of millions of Africans across both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as slaves, the colonial swoop on Africa, and more have produced disastrous effects on the cohesion and productive capacity of African societies. There's an urgent need, I believe, for Africa's historians to assess and write about the horrors suffered by Africans as a result of slavery, racism, colonialism and neo-colonialism. We need these records in order to institute legal proceedings for the payment of reparations to Africa!

Arguing along similar lines Memmi (1965: 91) points out: “…the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history.” This deprivation which produces the stereotypical epithet of Africans as a “people without history,” to borrow from Eric Wolf (Quoted in Booker, 25), denies African people access to a usable past from which they can rely in order to construct a viable future. It is critically important for Africans to understand the impact of the continent's past relations with the West in order to empower ourselves to deal effectively with the present and the future. African intellectuals have the duty to educate the people of Africa about the consequences of Western colonial and post-colonial meddling in Africa. Europeans and other Western powers continue to mislead and misinform Africans about their own history. Trevor Roper, an eminent English historian at Oxford claims that “prior to European adventure in Africa, there was only darkness, and darkness was not a subject for history.”(Quoted in Obiechina, 1975, 9) The onus is on African historians and literati to debunk myths like the one paraded by people like Roper about Africa's collective amnesia. This has to be done through sustained research and publication. It is time to call into question the condescending Eurocentric interrogations about Africans such as: where would Africa be without Europe? Would African peoples not be half-starving warring tribes eternally at each other's throat fighting for land? We have to desist from feeling permanently injured by a sense of inadequacy about our won achievements. African scholars must be courageous enough to confront perpetrators of half-truths about Africa. As Ngugi (op cit, 3) would have it:”The classes fighting against imperialism even in its neo-colonial stage and form have to confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle. “The debilitating effects of imperialism on the lives of Africans are real. It has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of the Africa today.

In the wake of the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-85, imperialism became a monopolistic parasite, a veritable bugbear of the people of Africa. History has it that on November 15, 1884 at the request of Portugal, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called together the major Western powers of the world to negotiate the African Question. Bismarck appreciated the opportunity to expand Germany's sphere of influence over Africa and desired to force Germany's rivals to struggle with one another for territory. What ultimately resulted was a hodgepodge of geometric boundaries that divided Africa into fifty irregular countries. This new map of the continent was superimposed over the one thousand indigenous cultures and regions of Africa. The new countries lacked rhyme or reason because European powers had divided coherent groups of people and merged together disparate groups who really did not get along. Little wonder that post-Berlin Africa has remained a “battlefield” to borrow the words of Graham Greene. The Berlin Conference was Africa's undoing in more ways than one. The colonial powers superimposed their hegemony on the African continent. By the time independence returned to Africa the realm had acquired a legacy of political fragmentation that could neither be eliminated nor made to operate satisfactorily.

The grand scheme hatched by the Europeans in Berlin succeeded largely due to the innate goodness of Africans. Africans are interested in relating rather than dominating, in exchanging rather than expropriating. That's why an African remains his brother's keeper at all times. A Hausa from Nigeria is a brother to a Hausa in Cameroon. A Fulani in Chad is a sister to a Fulani in Niger, a Bororo from Gabon is kith and kin to a Bororo from Equatorial Guinea, and so on and so forth. Without denying the cosmetic differences that exist amongst us, differences which have been exploited by our enemies to their own advantage, we must acknowledge that what unites us as Africans is vaster that what separates us. This is to say that the celebration of our diversity should constitute a stage in the process toward an African Federation, or better yet, the United States of Africa. Unity is the only contraption that will enable us to forge ahead in the global village. As the adage goes, united we stand; divided we fall. Our unity will empower us to face up to the different hegemonic challenges that threaten our very survival in the 21st century. Time has come for Africans to learn from the mistakes of the past. Never again, shall we give foreigners the leeway to divide and conquer us.

In this essay, I have attempted to trace the genesis of Africa's collective woes to the 1884 Berlin Conference where nascent imperialism occasioned the partition of Africa. I have further imputed the present state of underdevelopment and instability in Africa not to Africa's collective amnesia of the horrors of the past but to the overt and covert machinations of Western powers on the African continent.

WORKS CITED

Booker, Keith, M. 1998). The African Novel in English, Oxford: James curry.

Conrad, Joseph. (1960) Heart of Darkness, Englewood: Prentice Hall.

Europe News. (2007). 'Nine French Arrested in Chad for Kidnapping 103 Children,

Greene, Graham. (1959).It's a Battlefield, London: Heinemann.

Memmi, Albert. (1965). The Colonizer and the colonized, Translated by Howard Greenfield. New York: Orion Press.

Mudimbe, V.Y. Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1988.

Ngugi, wa Thiong'o. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Obiechina, Emmanuel. (1975). Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, New York: Cambridge

Yartney, Emmanuel. “Away with Double Standards.” Africa Today, July 2004, p.2.