A DOSE OF INFERIORITY COMPLEX

I woke up to a fine blue morning. The doves were cooing. The birds heralded the day. The branches of the tree near my bedroom window swayed softly, the leaves quivered gently in the early morning downpour. The day looked peaceful. It was the morning after the Black stars had lost to the Seleccao das Quinas of Portugal. No sooner had I tuned in to listen to the newspaper review on radio than my hackles began to rise. So disconcerting and mellifluous a so called social commentator sounded that I broke out in a cold sweat. According to him, Ghana shouldn't have gone into the tournament with a native coach since the latter pales in comparison with their white counterparts in terms of coaching. And to think that this shamefaced whippersnapper could be barking the wrong tree and still hold himself with the dignity of an African was rather putrid. I listened with jaded attention as he squealed with tendentious blabber. His moot point was that, Kwesi Appiah lacked the chutzpah to manage the ego of the playing body. 'A white coach would command the needed respect from the playing body', he asserted. To make matters worse, majority of the callers who contributed to the discussion seemed to be with one voice.

Indeed there is no gainsaying the fact that post colonialism permeates every sector of the African society. Perhaps the patently inexorable posture of the African to believe in himself and hold his own has allowed this maleficent doctrine to fester inordinately. In September 2013, after one of the blackstars' world cup qualifiers at the Baba Yara sport stadium, I couldn't help but admire the bravado and mental puissance of Coach Kwesi Appiah after the pugnacious and squealing Herve Renard, the then Zambian coach failed to hold a candle to the former. My blitheful disposition understandably stemmed from the lucid fact that, Kwesi Appiah had unreservedly made a case for the African, who hitherto was rancorously perceived as being timid and inferior.

Before colonialism Africans stood tall in all endeavours of life. They had a great culture rooted in religious and moral justification. They excelled artistically and politically. The Yorubas and Zulus of South Africa had a strong political system, so did the Ashantis.The Ashanti kingdom was one of the greatest kingdoms in pre colonial Africa. It had its beginning from the 17th century CE and reached the zenith of its power in the 19th century. .It was founded by an oyoko military leader, Osei Tutu in 1670. The authority of the kingdom was symbolized by a golden stool. They had an Ashanti constitution, a festival called odwira and an efficient army that protected the kingdom. They defeated the British in several battles most of which were led by the legendary Yaa Asantewaa.What about the Mandinkas of Mali who annihilated the Portuguese army in a fierce battle. For fear of dwarfing the rest of the world with its natural resources, rich culture, man -power and wisdom, false theories were propounded by the colonial whites to make the African feel inferior. They viewed our way of worship as barbaric, introduced Christianity and cowed us into capitulation. As a result, indigenous African forms of worship began to crumble. In their religion, Jesus is believed to be white while Satan is fictitiously believed to be black.

The world was thrown into a state of absurdity some years ago, when Dr James Watson, an American bio- physicist, luridly and vacuously claimed that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. After he was severely hauled over the coals for a claim he failed to buttress with scientific evidence, he backtracked. On the preceding score, it goes without saying that the dogma of portraying the African as being inferior has noxiously eaten into the morale fibre of the African society. Post colonial Ghanaian society, particularly the rural settings is inundated with an insipid Ghanaian aphorism that exoterically equates the Whiteman to God. It urges the African not to bother going to heaven to see God if he meets the Whiteman on his way. Not only incongruous this is with reality, but also stinks to the high heavens. The psyche of some perfidious black Africans has been perforated in no small measure that they would give their eye teeth to bleach their skin. History has it that during slavery times, the lighter skinned slaves worked in their masters house while the darker skinned worked in the fields, thus the lighter your complexion, the better you are treated and perhaps the closer you are to the whites.

They again brought about linguistic imbalances which demean and paint the image of the African in a prejudiced manner. The colonial language represents the Black African with an ideological bias. Although Africa has gained independence, the colonial language has failed to reflect this change with social reality. The English language for instance portrays ''white'' as favorable,honourable, etc,while frontally, ''Blackman'' is portrayed as having a black or very dark skin, evil spirit, etc.The practical ramification on that score is that we distrust ''made in Africa'' products as not good enough and seek solace in imported goods from the Whiteman's land. Some African manufacturers give foreign non African labels to their products else Africans will not patronize them. Today out of inferiority complex, Young African professionals are too desperate to travel to the Whiteman's land. Most African societies believe that travelling to Europe or America is an opportunity to acquire knowledge from the Whiteman. In a very competitive world in which the African is looked askance at and his continent not regarded earthy, it behoves on every African to put his or her shoulder to the wheel in exorcising the malignant continuance of colonialism with its distinct polarization of the world and mundane doctrines about the African.

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