Africa as the Cemetery of History

In a strange sort of way, I like Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He is a patriotic Russian and a highly intelligent man. He is not exactly what you would call a democrat. No Russian statesman ever has been. They have all been autocrats, be it Catherine the Great, Tsar Alexander I, Ivan the Terrible, V. I. Lenin, Yuri Andropov or Boris Yeltsin. The nearest that came to that ideal was the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps for that very reason he was disgraced out of power and the entire Soviet Empire collapsed under him.

Vladimir Putin was recently quoted as saying that Africa is nothing but a vast cemetery: “When an African becomes rich, his bank accounts are in Switzerland. He travels to France for medical treatment. He invests in Germany. He buys from Dubai. He consumes Chinese. He prays in Rome or Mecca. His children study in Europe. He travels to Canada, USA, Europe for tourism. If he dies, he will be buried in his country of Africa. Africa is just a cemetery for Africans. How could a cemetery be developed?”

Many Africans would be scandalised by such a statement, of course; but I believe Putin has fingered a major challenge in our hands. The heart of the problem is that Africa has no value in the world. Our continent has no value in the eyes of Africans themselves and no value in the eyes of the rest of the world. If you yourself don’t value what you have, why should anyone value it on your behalf? Thus it comes about that the dominant image of our continent in the West remains that of the “Dark Continent”, a hell-hole of war, violence, poverty, disease and death.

Why is Africa a cemetery for Africans?

It is a question, in my humble view, of history, global image and international political economy. No people in the entire history of humanity have suffered such injustice, mass genocide and humiliation as the Africans have suffered. For over 400 years 15 million Africans were transported into the New World as chattel slaves.  It was a horrendous humanitarian tragedy that destroyed entire societies and communities. Above all, it broke the spirit of the African people and destroyed their self-confidence as human beings.

Africa is the cradle of civilisation. The earliest human cultures began in Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC. But the highest civilisation of antiquity was, without a doubt, the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The greatest Greek philosophers, mathematicians and thinkers were schooled in Egypt, among them Thales of Miletus, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato. They were also initiated into the mystery cults of the Egyptians. Greek civilisation, which the West claims as its heritage, owed a lot to ancient Egypt.

The West and the Arabs have made it a point to deny that ancient Egypt was an African civilisation. Some of them have gone the ridiculous extent of claiming that the ancient Egyptians were aliens from outer space! It is strange indeed that no other place on earth had a civilisation built by aliens except Africa. The Senegalese scientist and historian Cheikh Anta Diop wrote profusely about the African origins of Egyptian civilisation. He became an outcast in mainstream Western academia. When former UNESCO Director-General Amadou Mahtar M’Bow set out a research programme to redress the egregious gaps in the history of Africa, he was hounded out by the world powers.

The late Martin Bernal (1937-2013), in his magnum opus, Black Athena, established incontrovertibly that ancient Egypt was predominantly an African civilisation and that the Greeks copied a lot from the Egyptians. Bernal, incidentally, was Jewish. His book enraged racist scholars such as Mary Lefkowitz, Jacques Berlinerblau and several others who declared it to be a work of heresy.

Intellectual racists know that once they concede that the greatest civilisation known in the ancient world was of African origin and that personages such as Akhenaton, Ramses II, Imhotep, Tutankhamen and Nefertiti were black, Africa would no longer occupy a servile status in the eyes of the world. The custodians of antiquity in Cairo have also joined the collusion to ensure that the truth is buried in layers upon layers of lies and stratagems. They are doing DNA tests on the mummies with Euro-American partners without involving African scientists in such projects. They clearly have a lot to hide.

History has been one of the greatest weapons used against the African people. The Arabs were among the first, and remain among the worst, of global racists. Hear the traveller and scholar Ibn Batuta writing in 1331:  "The geographer al-Idrisi ascribes 'lack of knowledge and defective minds' to the black peoples. Their ignorance, he says, is notorious; men of learning and distinction are almost unknown among them, and their kings only acquire what they know about government and justice from the instruction of learned visitors from farther north."   And the medieval North African historian and jurist Ibn Khaldun had to this to say about Africans: “The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage.” 

Among the Europeans, racism against African people did not exist in ancient times. The Romans saw Africans largely as equals, if not rivals.  The bitter conflict between Rome and Carthage was a battle for supremacy and for control of the Mediterranean. The Italian Renaissance artists depicted black Africans as different but equal. In Shakespeare’s Othello, we find a tragic hero who happened to be black. His blackness was incidental to his portrayal as a great man with a character flaw. Western racism began in the sixteenth with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and discovery of the New World.

Slavery and colonialism provided ideological justification for European racism. In 1830 the German philosopher Hegel wrote: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit…What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” 

The nineteenth century French aristocrat Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau declared that, of all the races of mankind, "the negroid variety is the lowest… "

Following on their trail, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, (Lord Dacre) infamously declared that Africa has no history: “Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.”

What is today termed “scientific racism” is deeply ingrained in Western academia and research institutions. Consider the remarks of James Watson, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the double helix: “[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”

I have been told that the name for Africa in mandarin Chinese is Feizhou. It literally means “Nothing State” – a place where nothing happens! The word fei in mandarin means something negative or evil. So Feizhou connotes a place of evil or negativity. By contrast, America is referred to as Meiguo, an object of great beauty. What late Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui termed global Apartheid remains the grim reality of our world today. Some 2 billion black Africans -- the single largest racial group on earth -- have been consigned to the margins of world civilisation. Through popular media and subliminal racism, their confidence has been shattered; as a consequence they have no confidence in themselves as a people.

The mandate of heaven today is for a new generation of African leaderships to redeem the image of our glorious continent. By virtue of natural endowments, we are by far the richest continent on earth. Our gene-pool is by far the most diverse. It is a source of wealth rather than a deformity.

I agree with the British development economist Dudley Seers when maintained several decades ago that oppressed peoples such as ourselves have a bounden duty to pursue pro-active policies of racial self-affirmation and economic nationalism. We must reinvent our continent as an inner-directed and inner-propelled vortex of glory, prosperity and hope.

No country is better placed to champion the African Renaissance than Nigeria. But we can only fulfil that destiny if we rebuild our country as a forward-looking, humane and prosperous democracy. We need world class leaders of intellect who can lift our country from the morass of mediocrity. Ours is a great and noble destiny. When Africa rises, the whole world will tremble. We have what it takes to match the best in the world. There are men and women of excellence and genius in Africa. They must stand up and be counted.

The late novelist Chinua Achebe once remarked: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”.  Those who removed history from our school curriculum ought to have been tried and shot for high treason. They have done us great evil. Unless you know where you are coming from you can never know who you are, let alone where you are going.  To quote the nineteenth French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, “Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom”