Contemporary Africa and association
ASSOCIATION has been by far one of the biggest obstacles of contemporary Africa, the struggle element that determines the way of thinking that the future is most likely to uphold. It is also by association that we breed self hate and a premises to define what is right or acceptable in our books.
I came across the trend of African attires and displays and the planned background of a lion here and other animals there; what picked my interest was the negative response to the trend.
Triggered
Of course with neutral perspective I was triggered by a few things; firstly, our understanding of the terminology ‘motherland’ as a concept or it’s association with the identity of Africa and there is the assumption that it is a reductionist term that is used to hold Africans captive to an era of old school and anti-modernisation. Apart from the mere fact that the term in no way defines a time in history and is in fact far from any era, but it’s a phase that speaks of the nature and richness of its existence – the birthplace of the human race.
A different side of contemporary Africa has been born, one that is highly obsessed with modernisation as a western revolution that anything African is associated with being backwards and lacking. This speaks volumes on the adoption of completeness and the role that westernisation has played in influencing us that their culture is the only acceptable social standard.
Discarded
We have adversely discarded the representation of us and our beauty and replaced it with another culture and called it ‘modern’. Today Africa is not a jungle, it’s not bushes with animals and it is as ‘beautiful’ as America because ‘we wear shorts and dresses, and we live in brick houses and have cellular network and motor vehicles’. This is true; to deny that we indeed have these resources and that contemporary Africa is not the same as the far fetched idea that many Americans and non Africans imagine it to be because of industrialisation, however industrialisation is not the enemy of identity.
Industrialisation has made abnormal the African way of life and has in fact made Africans hate their cultural diversity because they associate those descriptions and way of life with negative connotations and glorify modernity.
I call it a problem of association because it is a reflection of how out of touch with the self we have