Africa must take pride in all spheres

WE should be ashamed to claim to be African only on May 25, but we must always portray our “Africanness” daily through art, education, culture and many other strata.

We are now happy because people have found the literature of Frantz Fanon, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Anton Lembede, AP Mda, Kwame Nkrumah and many other Africanist academics, omitting the foreign knowledge of Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx and many other philosophers from the West, who at times are regarded to be more superior and relevant than African philosophers.

Our education system on this continent resembles the West’s intellectual centres. It is embarrassing that there is no University in Africa which offers Pan-Africanism or Black Consciousness as a qualification.

Education should be the pride of any nation. We cannot be proud to be boasting with the West’s knowledge at the cost of the African intelligentsia.

We have sufficient literature. This particular argument is evident in that the first university was found in Africa, the University of Timbuktu, and the University of Alexandra in Egypt. People came from around the world to learn and do research at our institutions.

Many Greek philosophers who developed a Western philosophy were taught in Africa. This includes the greatest philosopher of all time, Plato, who was also a teacher of Aristotle, who studied in Africa, and they went on to become intellectual role models.

We are more inferior than during the slavery period. Our people still see the West as a heaven; this can be seen through the music and attire of our people where they are imitating American singers, which play a crucial role in acculturation that is forcing you to abandon your own culture in favour of a foreign culture.

The Organisation for African Unity (OAU), the forerunner of the African Union (AU), has been susceptible and fragile, being funded from abroad, like ruling parties in different states of Africa. The AU has been unable to manage its own affairs and we saw Nato collaborating with three African countries to kill Colonel Muammar Gaddafi during the enactment of the 1973 UN Resolution of a no-fly zone.

We have come to accept money and protection of the West because the AU is broke.