ENGINEERING SKIN COLOUR LINES

Okello Oculi writes that Africans should be proud of their skin

W.E.B. Dubois was the first Black man to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis was on the role of Africans in creating human civilization. He showed that Greeks went to study in Ancient Egypt ruled by Black African Pharaohs to learn the Mathematics, the Medical Sciences, Religious and Political Philosophy and Astronomy which they passed into Europe.

This discovery calmed his pain about four hundred years of ‘’Black Folk’’ as victims of Euro-Americans importing Africans immigrants as labourers to build their economic and industrial growth. It also fuelled his research on historical and current social and economic conditions to achieve the liberation of African-Americans; and peoples exploited under dictatorships of European rule in Africa.

Like his contemporary, Russia’s Vladimir Lenin, he disagreed with Karl Marx’s prediction that workers everywhere under capitalism would unite in a universal brotherhood of overthrowing capitalism and creating socialism. He declared that the 20th Century would be characterized by Black and Yellow skins fighting against people with Caucasian skins. Capital owned by Caucasian would be promoted with political tools which would arouse Afro-Asians to mount liberation wars for freedom and economic growth. George Padmore supported him.

Not being Caucasian his earning Harvard’s highest academic flag did not open skies of advancement in American politics and business sectors. He turned his enormous intellectual powers to fathering Pan-Africanism as the call to Black peoples to fight for power in world affairs. This proposition has been made for Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, Thurgold Marshall, Colin Powel and all those labeled as ‘’high Yellow’’ who led Civil Rights struggles inside America.

In 1922, Sweden’s Ambassador to Brazil beat alarm bells about Brazil becoming the largest African country in the world if skin pigmentation was not politically engineered. A Brazilian sociologist created the concept of classifying persons with Afro-Caucasian skin colour as ‘’MESTIZO’’ – a separate racial category. The Brazilian state promoted feelings of superiority in them to persons of Black skins; while assuring them of being lower

NIGERIA’S MEDIA RECENTLY CARRIED A SHOCKING REPORT THAT OVER 60 MILLION NIGERIANS ARE SUFFERING FROM MENTAL ILLNESS. ONE CONTRIBUTING FACTOR MAY WELL BE WHAT FELA KUTI ONCE DENOUNCED AS ‘YELLOW FEVER’

than Caucasians.

The intense frustration which the American colour bar created in ‘’High Yellow’’ persons was diverted into a racial income rather than intellectual and business achievements. The managers of ‘’apartheid’’ in South Africa followed the Brazilian model by labeling ‘’Coloured’’ as a racial category. They were not altogether successful. The poet Denis Brutus ‘’was an honourable man’’ who, as a ‘’Coloured’’, fought against the evil regime.

In Jamaica, the MESTIZO were known as the ‘’Middle Class’’. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Michael Manley, separated from his ‘’Middle Class’’ wife, married Beverly, a Black Beauty. He also appointed a Black politician as the country’s foreign minister. Outrage in one skin-colour caste met jubilation among those who constituted over 85 per cent of the population. This courageous political engineering was aided by Cuba appointing Black supervisors over Caucasian and Black crews doing construction projects in Jamaica.

Nigeria’s media recently carried a shocking report that over 60 million Nigerians are suffering from mental illness. One contributing factor may well be what Fela Kuti once denounced as ‘’Yellow Fever’’. On 15th October, 2019, ARISE television reported on a children’s book by Hollywood star Lupita Nyong’o. She read out a letter from a girl who was so delighted by Lupita wearing her natural Black skin, and thereby saving her from purchasing chemicals to make her own skin ‘’yellow’’.

There is a skin-bleaching advertisement which brazenly links ‘’Yellow Fever’’ to being ‘’beautiful’’. DSTV shares with Nigerian television the monopoly by Yellow Fever females of news-casting. Officials in Ministries of Health, Information, Youth and Culture must consider psychological injuries to self-worth that these skin-colour engineering campaigns inflict inside eyes and minds. Mechanics working with mental spare parts must be taken on board in this matter.

The ‘’Black is Beautiful’’ campaign in the United States caused a massive panic among light-skinned African-American folks. They illustrated Albert Einstein’s view that: “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend the rest of its life believing that it is stupid’’.