The Challenge for Africa (6 page)

A further cause of vulnerability is the fact that those communities whose cultures and religions are oral rather than written and institutionalized are always likely to be more susceptible to the destabilizing forces of colonialism, unrest, or war. Across Africa, over the course of several decades, the cultures of many communities were pushed into irrelevance. The wisdom-keepers were dismissed as sorcerers and witches, and what they knew about their communities—the ceremonies, symbols, stories, dances, folklore—died with them.
The indigenous priesthood was replaced by a Christian one, which was defined as innately superior. The ways communities had learned about the land they lived on, the peoples who surrounded them, the God they worshipped, and their own reasons for being were lost as missionary schools replaced traditional systems of learning.

The Bible and the gun were not the only ways to impress the natives. There were the cotton clothes that replaced the wearing of animal skins. There was soap and salt and sugar. The use of stone and cement was a very new technology that allowed the building of large rectangular houses with many rooms, as opposed to traditional circular homes built with mud and thatch. There were also household goods that replaced calabashes, earthen pots, straw trays, and a whole range of artifacts. Instead, there came the glamour of official clothing, accoutrements, and mannerisms. All these were forceful symbols of the intruders' self-image and power and were embraced as tokens of modernity, gentility, and success.

This impressive materialism and social advantage stood to be acquired by the locals if they allowed the newcomers to settle on their lands and teach them the new ways of life. To inherit all these, the communities needed to accept the world of the missionaries and denounce their own culture. Furthermore, the colonialists and the missionaries didn't always have to push their ideas down the throats of the colonized population; once subdued, the public on their own accepted opportunities to become followers and collaborators. Some of the missionaries were welcomed into communities and naturalized by the elders, and lived among them as one of their own.

For most Africans, the imposition of colonialism—whether through conquest, immigration, or the demands of an unfair trading system—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries happened too fast for them to be able to adopt the new way of life and at the same time control the loss of their cultures
and civilizations. For some communities in Africa, though, the colonial experience was limited or short-lived, such as in Ethiopia and Botswana. Others were marginalized or ignored. For example, the pastoralist Maasai were stubborn in their unwillingness to cooperate with the colonial authorities, which were mainly interested in acquiring land for commercial farming. In Kenya, the Maasai were moved from much of their land and restricted to reservations that other Africans needed special permission to enter. As their interaction with the colonial authorities and missionaries was limited, the Maasai were able to keep their culture more intact. Ironically, it is the Maasai who are proud symbols of Kenya to tourists, precisely because they didn't surrender their culture and accept the vision presented to them through the cracked mirror.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the arrival of the Bible and the gun in Africa rests in the fact that it's almost exclusively because of the writings of the missionaries, the colonialists, and the Western social historians—those who largely dismissed the traditions of Africans as primitive tribal customs—that we know anything about many of the cultural practices of precolonial African peoples. When Africans desire to rediscover and reclaim their own culture, they're often obliged to travel to European and American libraries and archives for the information. It isn't unusual to find that foreigners know more about the native peoples than the latter know about themselves. Such is often the fate of the colonized.

Africans have been shaped by many experiences: invasion, the slave trade, liberation, discrimination, and apartheid; the arrival of literacy, Christianity, and Islam; and deculturalization and displacement. Some were beneficial and revolutionized the African way of life; others were destructive.

All these experiences have touched and shaped the African psyche. Perhaps because of the intensity, frequency, and persistence of these challenges, it has been more difficult for the
African spirit to overcome them than it has been for other peoples who experienced similar upheavals. The African leadership often failed to help its people deal with the impact of these experiences and instead tended to deny that they ever happened. Because Africa has not had a culture of writing, it has been easy to promote a culture of forgetting.

For instance, few Africans fully understand the history of the Atlantic slave trade, because for many generations this period was kept out of oral or written history and is largely unspoken of in Africa, even though Africans were the victims. If history is not passed orally from generation to generation, and it is not written in history books so that it is deliberately taught to the next generation, it quickly disappears from memory. Those who wrote the history of Africa that is taught in schools were often the perpetrators of the wrongs that were done and wrote from their perspective. Quite obviously, they preferred to “forget and move forward.”

It is often outside Africa that Africans begin to discover the untold story of slavery and other terrible deeds done to and by them on the continent. Many Africans are shocked when they discover the truth about their ancestors during the slave trade and colonial expansion. Now, finally, a more balanced history is being written by researchers who can access classified information, which may have been state secrets until recently.

As hurriedly and haphazardly as the European powers drew lines across the map of Africa in 1885, so in the 1950s and '60s did they retreat from their colonies. They coalesced groups of people to form nation-states, and many groups found themselves herded together into these new entities and identities. In eastern Africa, for instance, the Maasai were placed in Kenya and Tanzania; the Teso in Kenya and Uganda; the Somalis in
Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia; and the Luos in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The new nation-states were given a name, a flag, and a national anthem, and then handed over to a select group of Western-educated elites, most of whom were sympathetic to the colonial administration, whether they had been groomed for leadership by them or imprisoned or exiled instead.

The process of deculturization continued after independence, as the division between the new African elites and the peoples they governed continued to widen. The peoples of Africa were very disadvantaged—economically, in terms of education, and with their cultures destroyed. As a result, they were not in a position to hold their leaders accountable, and unfortunately their leaders took advantage of that fact. In addition, many of the new African states retained many elements of colonial governance, which leaders used to the same ends as the colonialists. They exploited their peoples in the name of progress, employment, and a better quality of life, and accumulated wealth for themselves, their families, and their friends, often corruptly and at the expense of the majority of their citizens. They adopted the attitude of the former European masters and did whatever they deemed necessary to maintain power. They took advantage of their peoples and then shed crocodile tears over their continued poverty, conflicts, and all the other ills associated with the continent.

Such wholesale robbery and destruction could have been achieved only through continuing to cultivate the culture of disempowerment, learned from the colonizers, that kept the great mass of people ignorant, fearful, passive, and obedient. The people's ignorance was promoted through the direct control of the flow of information. The national radio and television networks were monopolized and controlled. Public meetings and gatherings were disallowed so that citizens heard and did only what the state machinery let them hear and do.

The provincial administration, an agent of oppression and
one of the worst holdovers of colonial times, addressed the local people in languages that they did not fully comprehend; the people, either out of politeness or out of fear for their own safety, pretended they understood their new masters and applauded enthusiastically at the end of public speeches. Meanwhile, the leaders promised the show of good government. The citizens clapped with much enthusiasm at the empty assurances, and thanked the leaders for goods and services they never received. For the many peoples of Africa, the dreams of the postcolonial era were shattered.

Like many Africans, I have a deep ambivalence toward Africa's “founding fathers,” to say nothing of the second generation of political leadership. I am aware that, whatever their flaws or crimes, the first generation of postindependence leaders were all born subjects of European powers. The land of their fathers had been invaded and occupied, and their people subdued and colonized. One might argue that, when they looted the treasury and the natural resources at the expense of their own people and country, or made it easy for others to do the same, they were only doing what their former masters had taught them to do. And the people so wanted to believe in their indigenous African leaders that they might not have been willing to acknowledge the scale of the crimes committed against them, or feel they had the moral authority or the right to hold their leaders accountable.

Perhaps even more troubling than the heads of state themselves were their inner circles, the local administrators, and politicians, many of whom in the decades before independence had been collaborators with the colonial administration. As such, they had never had their own peoples' best interests at heart, but, rather, actively worked against them. At independence, many of these men were not held accountable for what they had done but instead were rewarded with political and economic power, which they continued to wield against their
peoples during the Cold War, and even after it ended. One wonders how many potential postindependence leaders who did not cooperate with the colonial authorities were sidelined or even executed by those same authorities, and who might have provided, in the end, better leadership for their people. It's a question that now, of course, can't be answered.

The gulf between the elites and the mass of the people still remains wide—not least concerning cultural identification. Even today, many African elites in government and elsewhere continue to trivialize their indigenous cultures and consider them retrogressive and irrelevant in today's world. At the national level, the continent's varied micro-national heritages are deliberately defined very narrowly to mean, for instance, traditional dances performed for politicians during ceremonial occasions or for tourists looking for the “authentic” or “exotic” Africa. In schools, on the radio, and on television, little of African culture is given serious attention, while other peoples' heritages are glorified. Many Africans very quickly embrace alternative cultures, principally from the West. For many today, that is all they know. It is a reflection of their society's material, political, and spiritual impoverishment.

Few African leaders recognize that what they call the “nation” is a veneer laid over a cultureless state—without values, identity, or character. Those who would promote local cultures and practices are still accused of fostering “tribalism” and division rather than unity. They are urged to shed the identity of their micro-nations and become citizens of the new modern state, even though no African really knows what the character of that modern state might be beyond a passport and an identity card.

Nearly fifty years from the time when we young Africans (including a Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr.) boarded planes
for further study in the United States, none of us could have imagined the conflicts, the coups, the civil wars, and the corruption of the imperial presidencies that would dog our continent for decades to come, or that the promise of Africa, which seemed almost inevitable at the time, would remain unfulfilled. The challenge continues for each new generation of Africans.

IN THE 1960S
, those of us Africans who entered the professions—medicine, teaching, business, and the civil service—felt confident that our continent was on the move, in spite of the emerging instability. Humanitarian and development arms of the international community did too, at least enough to advance substantial amounts of aid, technical assistance, and technology, and, at times, to adopt policies that urged more accountability in the management of state affairs. In 1964, western Europe and North America gave grants and inexpensive loans to sub-Saharan African nations amounting to more than $1 billion.
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Huge potential existed to develop Africa's natural resources, such as bauxite, uranium, gas, oil, gold, and diamonds. Indeed, in the 1960s, growth in many African economies was robust.