By Jenerali Ulimwengu
In Summary
- It’s like we are having Berlin all over again, only this time in our rulers’ presence, so that they know, a priori, what their peoples’ fate is likely to be in the new Scramble for Africa. This way there is a semblance of participation, even if the African peoples are none the wiser about what games are afoot.
There is something about Africans that makes us
easy to transport, to carry away, to render to destinations — both
physical and mental — that may or may not be compatible with our real
needs or safety.
Nowhere in the known chronicles of history is it
suggested that any other race was ever uprooted from its moorings and
transferred in such large numbers and to such far flung locations as
Africans were in the Slave Trade.
Of course, those who were thus translated did not
go of their own volition, but in many cases those who caused them to be
such mobile commodities were their own brethren, eager to turn a profit
or as retribution for some infraction or other.
The slavers who visited our coasts seldom went
inland to the catchment areas of the slaves. They would dock at the
coast and make their presence known and their intention to treat
obvious, and then the merchandise would be driven down to the sea in
long caravans yoked together and herded by fellow Africans.
We all know — and we should stop pretending that
we don’t — that it is that interface that made us the tools of Europe’s
development while at the same time depleting our human capital and
shattering our confidence and self-esteem for ever. We have never
recovered.
The docility and malleability of the Africans, and
the ease with which they could be made to capture, or to be captured by
their likes and hand them, or be handed over, to foreigners as
chattels, got the white man to start seeing Africans as somehow
subhuman, and therefore interesting subjects for another type of use
when slavery was no longer in economic vogue: Colonial exploitation.
Second phase
The Berlin Conference was another mode of
transportation, physically and mentally moving our pieces of territory —
complete with our ancestors’ graves and ancient shrines — from our
control and placing them in the hands of the white man, who then made us
serve him in that desecration.
The end of colonialism did not change anything
fundamental in our relationship, but only made it more subtle and more
insidious, more dangerous.
Having been transformed into other peoples’
caricatures, having lost all amour-propre and all sense of identity,
having been made to insult our own gods and to rent new ones, our
alienation has been completed by our rulers’ utter inability to deliver
socio-economic progress, and they have entrusted all our salvation to
the same people the encounter with whom we have never recovered from.
And we are being transferred once again, en masse,
from our countries, not severally, but in bundles of Africans, to go to
foreign lands so that we can be told, en masse, what role we are going
to play in the current competition among themselves.
So, African ministers are bundled together to go
to Japan, China, India, Turkey, Brazil and whoever else cares to have a
piece of this Africa that seems to have lost its owner, once again.
It’s like we are having Berlin all over again,
only this time in our rulers’ presence, so that they know, a priori,
what their peoples’ fate is likely to be in the new Scramble for Africa. This way there is a semblance of participation, even if the African peoples are none the wiser about what games are afoot.
Now, the other countries have been bundling together ministers and other middling players; the Americans have pulled off a big one
by trawling together all those heads of state to DC, just to show who
is boss. Those pictures tell the story of school pupils waiting for a
kind-hearted headmaster bringing candies.
Between those Africans who went in chains and
these Gucci-suited ones who went in private jets, which group is to envy
the other, I wonder?
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