The long shadows of the past
The core problem in Africa are the Africans themselves – By Akinyi Princess of K’Orinda-Yimbo
In her book, “Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare,” Kenya’s Akinyi Princess of K’Orinda-Yimbo ponders her continent’s collective inferiority complex. She presents her provocative arguments in this exclusive essay for The African Times.
This second largest continent on the planet is treated in the so-called developed world as a single land, even a single village. What is never mentioned is the continent’s staggering wealth. A wealth that, paradoxically, only causes poverty and “tribal wars” by proxy, corruption that has nothing to do with anybody else but Africans, diseases – some of which could be cured with clean drinking water, capital that always flows out of the continent – if it ever set foot there in the first place. Africa, the rich world maintains, is not a “normal” continent.
I concur but in a different context. Africa has a human gene pool more varied than anywhere else on the planet, where men hardly able to read and write declare themselves President For Life and get away with it, where a vice president of a nation can rape an HIV-positive woman and then state that he showered following his deadly deed – and still get elected as Thabo Mbeki’s successor.
Yes, “abnormal” Africa. Churchill once said, “The truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it, ignorance my deride it but in the end, there it is.” Churchill may not have known that time would pick up a murderous commercial momentum while voices like mine unwillingly remain pariahs in the publishing world.
In my book, I’ve delineated Africa’s “abnormality,” whose roots are both internal and external. If all humankind is a single species, then a few things have gone wrong in Africa. Clearly here, the perpetrator blames his victim and the victim acquiesces to the guilt.
Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize winner Jared Diamond disputes “the hypothesis that intellectual differences underlie technological differences,” and that “tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is. Because of those undoubted effects of childhood environment and learned knowledge on IQ test results, the psychologist’s efforts to date have not succeeded in convincingly establishing the postulated genetic deficiency in IQs of nonwhite peoples.”
Nearly all Africans, openly or secretly, collectively believe they are naturally brainless. What fatalism and resignation! What collective psychological damage. Underpinning these notions is the systematic destructiveness of many centuries from within and without the continent.
Ever since the 16th century, Africans have actively contributed to the incredible accumulation of wealth in the West, and under the cruelest and most dehumanizing conditions. They are still paying with their lives to keep up this wealth accumulation that has completely run amok. Why are Africans letting themselves still be “willingly” dehumanized? All members of humanity are born with innate pride and the will to fight to the death to maintain their virtues, however poor one is. Why this abject submission by Africans? They are the only “natives” who managed to drive Euro-ancestrals out and regain their continent for themselves.
Africans have had role models in the past four or five decades who, combined with the ever increasing fatalism, have taught them that hard work does not pay unless one has connections, a human trait in all societies since time immemorial, trebled in Africa. Even deities have connections to link them with their worshippers.
Raymond Baker, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for International Policy, said in an oral testimony to the All Africa Party Parliamentary Group as far back as January 2001: “We have been putting about $25 billion (€19 billion) a year of foreign aid into Africa in the most recent years. Compare that with my estimate of the amount of money that goes illegally out of Africa and ultimately into Western coffers, $100-200 billion. In other words, for every $1 of foreign aid that we are generously handing out across the top of the table, we are taking back some $4-$8 in dirty money under the table.”
At the core of Africa’s problems are the Africans themselves. No other group has been as physically and psychologically brutalized by strangers for all of 500 years. The end is nowhere in sight. Slavery has been practiced throughout human history, also between homogeneous groups. But for Africans, after slavery came colonization. This experience was more traumatizing than slavery. Strange people appeared out of nowhere to take the land – the people’s highest religious symbol. There was no stopping them; a handful could kill 10,000 warriors in a matter of hours.
It was survival not of the physically fittest but of the militarily mightiest. It took Africans time to recover and think up strategies and tactics against the victors’ military might. Then, just as independence dawned, Africans were latched into the toughest chains ever: dictators appointed by the ex-colonialists. These were kleptocratic, corrupt candidates without merit. The pattern was sculpted in marble.
These processes were inconsistent, abrupt, capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable and cripplingly intense. Africans sustained severe and irreversible setbacks, irreparable without concerted efforts made to revert them.
In the sociological sense, Africans have emerged through all this with a collective inferiority complex. The African elite feel inferior to nearly all other cultures and peoples, and are afflicted with a pathological desire to overcompensate by spectacularly achieving or by adopting extremely antisocial behavior. There is no denying the fact that Africans tend to have negative self-esteem and self-worth fluctuating between over-evaluation and devaluation of themselves and of others. Most cannot deal with criticism, failures, disillusionment, setbacks or disappointment, basing their self-image largely on outside events like subordination, absolutism, Swiss bank accounts, domains in England and castles all over Europe. They turn arrogant, haughty, paranoid and sadistic. The dissonance breeds the desire to remain in the world of fantasy, grandiosity and entitlement. Ultimately, they engage in a feverish search for unconditional admiration. Whatever they undertake is done from a position of omnipotence.
How did the Africans catch this contagion?
Slavery brought Africans to cultivate a mentality of self-negation. Their skin color eventually spelled slavery and slavery was the prerequisite for this pigmentation. Their monarchs, their nobility, religious and military dignitaries were overwhelmed by a military superiority they were powerless against. These pillars of their society could now protect neither their people nor themselves.
When it was not their monarchs and dignitaries, it was their children, spouses, parents and siblings. Those left behind were either weak, sick, crippled or hardly out of infancy. They did not know how long they themselves would remain free, left with no spiritual, medicinal, political or military organizations worth relying on. They blindly roamed around their vast continent in an attempt to survive. Most continental Africans thus embarked on building temporary settlements and practicing a life of mere subsistence. Not only the stranger who crossed your path but also your general merchant, your neighbor or your ruler was a potential enemy and was not to be trusted. Those who had sought a settled life with central organizations were forced into a nomadic existence, always penetrating inland in order to survive. They mutilated their bodies or the bodies of their children to make them look unattractive or weak to the slavers.
Personalities could not thrive where mistrust had such vast influence.
Now the worst human relationships took root: the defeated African always met the victorious European in an attitude of self-negation, subservience and inferiority. To this minute, when African leaders sit with Euro-ancestral leaders on conference tables, the African self-doubt is a screaming aura around them. Most Africans’ composure becomes labored and their carriage cramped. The word civilization rings alarming bells in their psyches, reminding them that their own civilization had not been good enough to move forward, so why bother with it. The Africans are not at ease, in the psychological sense. This happens involuntarily because it is buried deep in their souls.
The triumphant European, on the other hand, always met the defeated African with an attitude of self-assertion, self-esteem, lordliness and superiority. Europeans were always the superhuman and the Africans forever mere objects or at best subhuman. Civilized Afro-Oriental Christian values, helplessly squeezed in the stranglehold of the new Euro-ancestral fist, had no room for an alternative. In the embryonic Christendom that had to function with a military strait jacket, faith had to have a flexible morality conducive to human greed.
Today, if the rest of the world’s population consumed as much as the wealthy West does, humankind would need five Planet Earths. There is a thin line between cunning, manipulative socio- and psychopathic behavior and the narcissistic. To the Euro-ancestrals, the Age of Enlightenment was a Jekyll and Hyde milestone. They classified everything, labeling their pink complexion white. Then came the downgrading of yellow, red, brown and black. Humankind has inborn negative associations with the color black. It is reminiscent of the primordial days.
Those with mixed backgrounds like U.S. President Barack Obama miraculously turn their 50 percent pink coloration black. This was and is a psychological booby-trap set up to keep on ensnaring Afro-ancestrals with a constant confirmation of their “evilness.” While no one is better at setting up such psychological booby-traps than the Euro-ancestrals, no one is better at the servility required to meekly accept such a subtly corrosive, damaging notion than Afro-ancestrals. They have been religiously passing on this corrosive notion to their progenies over centuries. One embryonic branch of humankind’s divisive, disordered, dysfunctional behavior has now permeated the entire species like a terminal virus. “All cruelty springs from weakness,” said Seneca. He certainly did not mean physical weakness.
– Akinyi Princess of K’Orinda-Yimbo’s book “Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare. A Critical Observation of Neighboring Continents” was published in 2008 by Algora Publishing, New York.