Is the past really Africa's enemy or are we?

After 17 years of democracy in South Africa I ask myself whether the ANC is capable of evolving from a “liberation movement” to a government in this century. Can we still honestly blame European colonialism for Africa’s ills of today?

I revisited Frantz Fanon’s 1961 seminal essay The Wretched of the Earth or Les Damnés de la Terre, this week and the following passage jumped up at me: “Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever farther!”

Africans have been expertly arguing that what is happening in Africa is nothing but residues of colonialism, but nobody explains why we still follow the terrible examples of our former colonial masters if we know without a shadow of doubt that they are wrong?

Are we saying that we are intellectually incapable of breaking free from the spell of Europeans and chart our own path? And will it make sense to discard one European ideology (capitalism) only to replace it with another (socialism/communism)? What is Africa’s alternative?

Fanons says: “We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.”

I agree that there is a lot wrong with the Western way of doing things from capitalist greed to the destructive nature of the advancement path chosen by superpower nations. If they had chosen the right path, we wouldn’t be worried about climate change and radiation right now. But that’s an argument for another day.

Fanon also says: “When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.”

The first president of a free Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah pinpoints out Africa’s post colonial predicament in his speech I Speak of Freedom), when he says: "By far the greatest wrong which the departing colonialists inflicted on us, and which we now continue to inflict on ourselves in our present state of disunity, was to leave us divided into economically unviable States which bear no possibility of real development...."

He goes further in his 1964 speech at the Organisation of African Unity (AU) summit in Cairo, Egypt, to say:"...We must unite for economic viability, first of all, and then to recover our mineral wealth in Southern Africa, so that our vast resources and capacity for development will bring prosperity for us and additional benefits for the rest of the world. That is why I have written elsewhere that the emancipation of Africa could be the emancipation of Man."

In his autobiography he says: "In the very early days of the Christian era, long before England had assumed any importance, long even before her people had united into a nation, our ancestors had attained a great empire, which lasted until the eleventh century, when it fell before the attacks of the Moors of the North.

At its height that empire stretched from Timbuktu to Bamako, and even as far as to the Atlantic. It is said that lawyers and scholars were much respected in that empire and that the inhabitants of Ghana wore garments of wool, cotton, silk and velvet. There was trade in copper, gold and textile fabrics, and jewels and weapons of gold and silver were carried."

What is making unity an impossibility in the African continent? Nkrumah’s dream of a united states of Africa didn’t get support from other African leaders due to jealousy and mistrust. Former South African president Thabo Mbeki was met with a similar reception when he recently tried to revive the dream under the auspices of ‘The African Renaissance’. He only really had support from his Nigerian counterpart Oluṣẹgun Ọbasanjọ.

Sadly it is still the very same jealousy and mistrust (now new and improved and fortified with greed) that remain the main obstacle to African prosperity. Which begs the question: It is amazing that we have not moved an inch ideologically from the 1960s.

It is time we stopped pointing fingers and did serious introspection. Only then will we be able to tackle Africa’s problems as Africans without having the need to reference colonialism in general for Africa and apartheid in particular in the case of South Africa.