It is not only the leaders who have this me-here-and-now-damn-the-rest mentality. It is a mental aptitude very common in Africa. That is the reason why there so many tyrants in Africa, why each tyrant has millions of supporters and why it has been near impossible for democracy to take root in many African countries even after the last tyrant is killed – five or more always emerge from the woodwork! It was this same mentality that made it ease for a Blackman to sell his own neighbour as a slave for a piece of calico and a handful of beads!
As the slave trade started to boom many blacks should have realised the hell-on-earth situation they had created – those selling neighbours as slaves today would just as easily find themselves being sold into slavery tomorrow and, no doubt, that is exactly what happened. Of course, many African scholar have heaped all the blame of slavery on the door of the white men; as for the blacks they are clean, they were the helpless victims. According to Professor Mazrui and many other apologists, the Africans were the helpless victims of not just colonial rule but post colonial rule! Well some things never change.
Still, if we are serious about climbing out of the bottomless pit of poverty and despair we in Africa find ourselves today; then we must stop wallowing in self pity and, worse still, blame colonialism for our own failures. We must accept the universal truth that no good can ever come out of our present me-here-and-now-damn-the-rest mentality. Yes the looting in Zimbabwe, for example, has created a few millionaires but at the expense of destroying the country’s national economy throwing millions into a life of abject poverty. The sum total of Mugabe’s black empowerment is untold suffering and death. We must also accept the empirical truth that the common good is best served when all have a meaningful say in public affairs.
1 comment:
@White Trash
I agree with you, colonialism did get some things right. After all many African countries do consider the pre-independence years as the golden age compared to what followed. Even if the years of colonial rule produced nothing but misery for Africa; for how long after independence can Africa continue to blame the whites for the continent’s ills? In the West incoming regimes have a year maximum in which they can attribute continued poor performance to the regime before them. Thirty and fifty years after independence and still some African leaders blame colonialism for their countries’ pathetic economic performance year on year decade after decade. And this is in the overwhelming evidence of mismanagement, corruption and whole looting by the same leaders!
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