How they psyche you

Posted by By Akogun Akomolafe at 4 October, at 14 : 00 PM Print

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“Keep your culture Don’t be afraid of the vulture Grow your dreadlock Don’t be afraid of the wolf pack…” – Bob Marley, from the album ‘CONFRONTATION.’

‘European CIVILIZATION will be a good Idea.’ Ghandi

In his quest for world domination/destruction, the European (and our definition of European includes the bastards Europe sired in North, South and Central America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand), does not always employ violence. Sometimes his cynical smile is more deadly than the heaviest gun in his formidable arsenal of instruments of savagery.

Those of us who grew up in Africa will remember that the first image of the European, was that of the benevolent, always smiling priest, who live in the biggest house in our villages, consuming the best products we produced, while producing nothing. It was not his to partake in the toil, no. He only consume what others produced.

According to him, he is ministering to our spiritual needs. Imagine that! A European from a spiritless, loveless, joyless and decadent place like Europe, crossing deserts and oceans to come and teach us about love, brotherhood and human companionship. The Yorubas have a saying that if a man promises to buy you a dress, you should first of all look at what he’s wearing. You shouldn’t take seriously a man attired in rags promising to buy you a beautiful dress. How could a man who has known no love in his entire life promise to teach same?

We were ignorant then. We have been brainwashed into believing in the goodness of white men. Such is the power of the European ideological institutions that they have managed to turned a historically oppressing race into one with godlike qualities. When it comes to manipulating facts, Europeans are second to none. We are singing their praises instead of condemning and attacking them. They are experts at masking their intentions and camouflaging their evil desires in holy halo. They are masters at laughing with their face, while plotting with their hearts.

I am a cultural nationalist. I believe that culture is the most important thing in this world. Culture defines whom you are. What you think of your culture says a lot about what you think of yourself. Culture is not only music and arts, although they are important components of it. Culture encompasses also language, traditions, mode of dressing, of eating, in short, of living. A cultural philistine cannot respect himself.

This fact is well known to the European, that’s the reason why he is doing its utmost to attack our cultural patrimony. All the ideological institutions in the western world are doing nothing except to denigrate African culture, and to promote theirs. Mind you, you will hardly see them attacking the African person, no. They will attack our culture, and make caricature of that which is dear to us.

Take religion for instance. When Europeans descended on Africa like a horde of rampaging vampires. They not only intended to kill us physically, but also psychologically. How do you kill a man psychologically except by taken away his culture. By taken away his culture, you reduced the man to a no-person. By emptying a man culturally, you reduce him to a psychological cripple. He’s stripped naked.
How did the Europeans accomplished this? They did so by casting our religions as paganism. How?

Among the first things the Europeans did was to condemn our gods and cast them into a bonfire. Wherever they go, they born our gods, our shrines and our altars. They said that we are pagans because we worship THE IMAGES of our gods. Did the Europeans gave us his own god? No. He gave us THE IMAGE of his own god! See how clever he operates. He gave us the image of a guy nailed to a cross, in obvious agony. To bow to such image is, to the European, not paganisms, but Christianity! So successful are the Europeans that churches in Europe are packed full with Africans! Even when most Europeans are skeptical about the Christian religion, Africans are prepared to die in defence of the adopted religion. It is a daunting task to convince the African nowadays that before the Europeans came our way, we never heard of Jesus Christ or his supposed father in heaven. Most African Christians will do battle, to challenge the simple fact that Africans were building empires, before they were acquainted with Jehovah.

That was not all the European managed to achieve. He not only laughs at our gods, he taught us to laugh at our own god. It is one thing for a man to laugh at your father; it is entirely another thing if he can teach you to laugh at your own father. That is a unique feat and that is what the European has successfully accomplished. So complete is the brain-washing that Africans are ashamed to partake in their traditional religious rites! They don’t want to appear ‘UNCIVILISED.’ And the more EDUCATED the African, the more contempt he feels for his African religion! We have a situation where a man is considered EDUCATED if he is totally weaned away from his history – from his culture. The African who has the most contempt for Africa is deemed by the European to be sophisticated, a man of the world.

To round up:

After much reflection, Marx declared religion to be the opiate of the people. If opiate are sedatives, then Marx was only half- right. Religion nowadays, especially in Africa, has become the amphetamine of the people.

Africans are ready to slaughter one another, in the name of these religions that purportedly teach tolerance and brotherhood and love. Arab, Asian and European missionaries continue to swamp our continent converting Africans into religions that are being rejected in their countries of origin. They live in the best houses, eat the best food, drink the best wines, and tool around African cities in the best limousines, while telling their ignorant congregation that ‘everything in this world is vanity.’

Africans must continue to wait for a paradise hereafter, while these foreigners are bulging their stomachs with loot from our land. It does not matter that most Europeans no longer go to church or believe in God, Africans continue to die for a ‘Messiah’ that was denied by his own people. Are we ever going to learn?
It is time we start to ask ourselves what benefits we derived from worshipping these alien gods. Materially, we are worse off now that we know about Jesus and Mohammed. Our fathers were building cities, pyramids, and empires without knowing about a Jewish tribal god called Jehovah. Our fathers were mining and smelting iron without knowing about an Arab called Mohammed.

Spiritually, we are more decadent that before these foreign gods were introduced to us. We have a well-ordered society, which these Middle-Eastern religions contributed in large measure to destroy. African governments can start by expelling these missionaries who, in the words of Ingersoll, are making their living by pretending to stand between the helplessness of man, and the wrath of the gods.

They can then ask the indigenous religionists to start paying taxes like any other business concerns. We should remember the warning to beware of saints whose charity pays their salaries. We should also start to educate ourselves that every society creates its own god in its own image. The colonialist supplanted our religious beliefs with theirs, among their other cultural imposition. Three decades after we supposedly freed ourselves, is it not time we re-discover our roots? Why should Africans continue to supplicate to the figure of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus when all historical records point to the fact that he was Hebrew? What do the Arabs know about tolerance that they can teach Africans? And the sanctimonious European missionaries roaming around Africa should tell us what they know about love that we can learn from them. We need to educate ourselves that no society has been developed by religions, and none shall ever be. Instead of taking pride in knowing the Bible and the Koran by heart, Africans should start learning those skills could help transform their countries and their continent into viable societies.

Our generation may be lost, but we should, at least, save those things that are salvageable, for the coming generations.

And on language. In Africa during the colonial period, the European out rightly banned the speaking of African language at all the ideological institutions he created to celebrate himself and his race. I remembered been punished for speaking my language, Yoruba, during my secondary school years. Mind you, Nigeria (the ‘country’ to which the British consigned me) has been ‘INDEPENDENT’ for about ten years! So successfully was the indoctrination that several years after the colonialists took their leave from our lands, their policies are still being carried out by the colonialist dogs they have trained. It is a confirmation of this success that today you have Africans who refuse to speak their language, because they think that it is primitive. And we have a situation today whereby many of us are writing to our parents in a foreign language.

These are conscious efforts on the part of the Europeans. Their aim was to create Africans who look and think like them. When they control our lands, they took a few of us, give them some western education and promoted them to ‘interpreters.’ Such jobs in colonial Africa were plum jobs, indeed. Africans were fighting among themselves to get it, since it is considered an honor to be the nearest to the white god.

We have African leaders like Senghor who took great pride in being recognized as great French grammarian! This guy was even more French than the French.
The most tragic thing in post colonial Africa was the refusal of the leaders to do away with these odious legacies. Aside from Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere tried to develop an authentic African outlook, no other nation in Africa made that conscious effort, not even Nkrumah, easily the most articulate of them all. Nyerere adopted KiSwahili as his country’s official language. This is quite logical since that is the language spoken by most of his compatriots. Nyerere speaks and writes English very well and could have easily made the Queen’s language the lingua franca.

African nations like Nigeria or Ghana or Senegal could have taken one of the indigenous African languages and adopted it as the lingua franca or even develop one from scratch. This is not as daunting as it seems. All that is needed is conscious and committed leadership. Indonesia successfully did it. When Indonesia got its independence from the Dutch in 1948, there was nothing like Indonesian language. The Indonesian leaders could have opted for the easy way and adopted Javanese, the majority language. No, they didn’t. They set out to create the Indonesian identity complete with a language. Today, what the Dutch took centuries to pull apart, the Indonesians have successfully put together. It is a joy seeing Indonesians communicating together in their OWN language with doesn’t exist until about half a century ago.

Kamuzu Banda, the late Malawian president perhaps illustrated the caricature the Europeans created in Africa. This old man will not be found with nothing but a three-piece suit, complete with a bowler hat. This is man who built a school in his country that still teaches Latin! To him, a dead language Latin is a CLASSICAL language! I have been to conferences where we find Africans sweating profusely in their three-piece suit. They are trying desperately to impress the Europeans. The Europeans, whom they are trying to impress, have shed their jackets and ties, simply because it was too warm.

 

About the Author

Femi Akomolafe is a passionate Pan-Africanist. A columnist for the Accra-based Daily Dispatch newspaper and Correspondent for the New African magazine. Femi lives in both Europe and Africa, and writes regularly on Africa-related issues for various newspapers and magazines.

Femi was the producer of the FOCUS ON AFRICANS TV Interview programme for the MultiTV Station.

He is also the CEO of Alaye Dot Biz Limited Dot Biz, a Kasoa-based Multimedia organisation that specialises in Audio and Video Production. He loves to shoot and edit video documentaries.

His highly-acclaimed books (“Africa: Destroyed by the gods,” “Africa: It shall be well,” “18 African Fables & Moonlight Stories” and “Ghana: Basic Facts + More”) are now available for sales at the following bookshops/offices:

1. Freedom Bookshop, near Apollo Theatre, Accra.
2. The Daily Dispatch Office, Labone – Accra
3. WEB Dubois Pan-African Centre, Accra
4. Ghana Writers Association office, PAWA House, Roman Ridge, Accra.
5. African Kitchen in Amsterdam Bijlmer

Where to buy them online:

On Lulu Books:

18 African Fables & Moonlight Stories https://goo.gl/Skohtn

Ghana: Basic Facts + More: https://goo.gl/73ni99

Africa: Destroyed by the gods: https://goo.gl/HHmFfr

Africa: It shall be well: https://goo.gl/KIMcIm

 

Africa: it shall be well

on Kindle books: https://www.createspace.com/4820404

on Amazon books: http://goo.gl/QeFxbl

on Lulu Books: https://goo.gl/SQeoKD

 

Africa: Destroyed by the gods

on Kindle books: https://www.createspace.com/4811974

on Amazon books: http://goo.gl/1z97ND

on Lulu Books: http://goo.gl/KIMcIm

 

My Lulu Books page: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/FemiAkomolafe

 

Get free promotional materials here:

1. Africa: it shall be well: http://alaye.biz/africa-it-shall-be-well-introduction-in-pdf/

A FREE Chapter of ‘Africa: It shall be well’ could be downloaded here: http://alaye.biz/africa-it-shall-be-well-a-free-chapter/

2. Africa: Destroyed by the gods (How religiosity destroyed Africa) http://alaye.biz/africa-destroyed-by-the-gods-introduction/

A FREE Chapter of ‘Africa: Destroyed by the gods’ could be downloaded here: http://alaye.biz/africa-destroyed-by-the-gods-free-chapter/

Read a review here

Contact Femi:

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Kindly help me share the books’ links with your friends and, grin, please purchase your copies.

Comradely,

Femi Akomolafe

 

 

 

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