Showing posts with label Africa and the West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Africa and the West. Show all posts

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Democracy: An African burden

English: The King of Swaziland Mswati III at t...
English: The King of Swaziland Mswati III at the reed dance festival 2006 where he will choose his next wife.. Deutsch: Der König von Swasiland Mswati III bei dem Reed Dance Festival 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Uneasy, they say, lies the head that wears the crown. That adage, apt for a time when kings were a law unto themselves, when they had the power over life and death, still finds strong expression in this age.

These days, kings, except they are of Middle Eastern or Asian stock (let’s add Swaziland to the number), are largely without the powers to decide the fate of a nation. The powers that made them all-powerful in the past now reside with the commoners; or so it would seem.

Nations, having shed that feudal system that perpetuates the lordship of one family over the whole generation after generation, have now generally embraced the one that allows people to have a say on who rules over them. People now have the liberty to put their views to vote and the purview to remove a leader that is not working up to par—in an ideal scenario.  Democracy, the system of having a say in the selection of one’s leaders, in its ideal sense, is one that cannot be faulted.
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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Reach out to the past, and begin to get respect

Among Nigerian youths, there is a growing disconnect from cultural affiliations and ancestral roots. This disconnect, worn like a symbol of status and modernity by many, is more clearly defined when conversations swing towards cultural practices that held sway in the past and the relevance of such practices to the present.
While some of today’s youth opt to carry on like strangers from planets where such practices are unheard of, others turn up their noses up at it, consigning the discourse to the same plane they place things that conflict with the new religions, the dregs of the mind.
To them, those who advocate a reversion to ways that worked well enough in the past, are the rare breeds that hang on to notions that there is something good in a past  better consigned to the fate of the Godless people that lived then.
But my friends, many of who fall into the above category and who I try to dissuade from running away from our cultural history, are simply enigmatic, they hang on to my words, not really hearing the truth in them, but listening anyway.
What can one do but keep trying to open their eyes to the truth, to show them that there were more to our forbearers, that the rules they held sacred were for a reason, and that this reason still hold.
Being of a class of the so-called fortunate in a society of want -- a society where little work -- I have as friends, very educated individuals -- at least by western standards. These friends are likely to pander to western ideals; as such they do not buy my arguments. They only smile and call me “traditional ruler” or one who worships the Christian devil -- to whom the glorious days of our fathers are now ascribed.
For ages now, our people have been programmed by the largely misinterpreted teachings of the Christian Christ and his Semitic brother prophet, making it imperative that I keep my peace and desist from continually telling them that religion is just one aspect of culture, and is far from being wholesome.
It is not that I fear being likened to an incarnate of an entity that does not exist in the religion of my forefathers; I am however moved to silence by the realisation of the extent of the collective brainwashing that makes sure we remain second class citizens, even to our own eyes.
I find my hands tied and my tongue stopped by the sheer blindness with which our people continue to lean towards imported values. Our fathers, those ones that sold our souls for strips of coloured clothe and bits of shinny mirror, felt inadequate before the men from across the seas, that they equated them to gods.
Now, years after they proved that first observation wrong, I smile at the fact that we, their progeny, still deem it proper to worship at the feet of the white man and take his every word as proper and factual.
Years after the fall of the colonialism that made sure we gave without question -- that same one that held us hostage for years -- our youths and their blind parents still cling to the vestiges of white supremacy and turn their nose up at the laws our fathers laid to guide our doings.
Ask me again why we don’t get respect.
You watch Hollywood movies set in anywhere but Africa and you see the almost worship like reverence of local cultures. Here, the reverse is the norm, made more manifest by the stupid acquiescence of our brothers.
As I say to my friends, “we have to look back, we have to ask our ancestors, we have to look for that which worked for them, and apply this to our age and time”. Only then can we hope to truly touch the sky when we reach out.

Article originally published by bizinafrica.biz and dailytimes.com.ng

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Time to bite back harder


Weeks ago, while seeking creative stimulus on television, I chanced upon an American programme, one of those life-of-a-very-rich-brat formats that are becoming very popular these days.


This one centred on an eighteen year old girl who came home to receive what she termed the worst news of her life - a forced visit to Africa (it was actually Kenya) as a birthday present.

My grouse is not with the programme title (though ‘Exiled’, is a rather harsh name for a holiday to the Kenyan Savannah) but with the way, the producers conveniently skipped most of modern Kenya - minus a beat up Land Rover and a khaki wearing guide. The editor cut off all references to modern Kenya, leaving just a sparsely populated Masai village, whose natives paint their round earthen huts with cow dung - a point the teenager made sure to stress when her rich dad called her via satellite phone.

Another sore point is with the subtitles. The native guide in the programme, a tall, beautiful Masai girl inappropriately named Josephine, who spoke clear, just slightly accented English, had her words subtitled, while the nasal sounding American teenager, whose words seem to drawl forever, made do without subtitles.

Anyway, I took solace in the thought that the use of subtitles probably meant Americans cannot understand clear, well-spoken English. Perhaps I am propagating a stereotype here but what else does the constant use of subtitles when African speakers are concerned denote?

However, as we all know, double standards are hallmarks of the great western experience.

One would have expected Josephine to be invited to partake, even if briefly, in the ‘good life’ when her American guest went back home, but, expectedly, nothing of such occurred. The American girl went back home to tell about the horrors she faced during her five-day stay, further subjecting an already badly informed society to more miss-education .

Time and time again, I have come across condescending stereotypical opinions about Africa and Africans in the western media. I used to excuse these statements, believing, erroneously, that the writers did not know enough about Africa to form an opinion about the topic they chose to spotlight, when in truth, these writers were following a cultural script that sends every negative image about Africa to the top of the list without recourse to factuality.

I was so set in my belief that human nature makes it imperative for people to seek knowledge about the unknown, that a thirst for knowledge inherent in man makes discovery possible.

Well, I believed wrong. For the West, knowledge about Africa, when not linked to profit making, is generally constrained to stories about despotic leaders, child soldiers, wars, epidemics and recently, mass rapes. Even knowledge about economic potential exploited from Africa is usually left to the annual reports of western multinationals involved in the exploitation.

Sometime ago a friend pondered on his Facebook status about the common perception by westerners that Africa is one country. The answer, which I am sure you would have grasped, points to an institutionalised apathy to knowledge outside the western sphere of influence.

Thankfully, I was not one of those that bought into the Obamamania that swept this planet a few years ago.
Africans, even more than the African Americans, saw in that man’s ascension a sign of the acceptance of the African into the scheme of things.

They forgot that Obama, raised within the safety of his white mother’s family, would naturally feel more affinity to that race, hence, the little impact of his government on the perception of Africa on the global stage.

The battle to get Africa more respect in the western media should be an all-inclusive one. Let us shout to the high heavens when we feel aggrieved, let the African American media spare Africa more coverage; let their celebrities visit more, and not just our game reserves, let their writers counter the negative images that the west seem to feed off. Only by doing such can they find relevance in a society that begrudges them their blackness. An African American posting a picture of starving children in Somalia beside that of poor welfare African American kids in a quest to explain why she is proud of her ‘good fortune’ for being born American smacks too much of self loathing and the culture of ignorance we are talking about.

We in Africa should also do more to sell ourselves. We have to start believing again, to look beyond the toga of bad leadership and embrace a more positive outlook to life, if for nothing, then for the fact that the western world needs us more than we need them.

There is really nothing to be ashamed of in being an African, we may be poor by Dollar and Pound standards, but as Eric Donaldson said, ‘‘the progress you make is not about how rich you are’’.