Feature
Searching The Heart of Africa
Bright Molande
Great truths begin as blasphemy. So too blasphemous then to say, if you cannot believe in the story of your heartbeat -- that you live, why should vultures hovering about for their survival believe in you? There are many who do not still believe that Malawi, that Africa is capable of rising. It is the story of Africa.
And the story of Africa is beautiful. Well, “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it,” said the Chinese great teacher, Confucius and that was 479 years
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| The Great wall of China |
All eyes at China now, and the word China literally almost “the centre of the world” and the ancient Chinese believed themselves to be the “centre of civilization.” This was the heart of their faith – believing that the engine of social transformation was within their own heart. Not elsewhere, not far away in Europe or America. The Chinese had to discover themselves first. Now China has blossomed like a giant yellow flower unto the world.
Yet, much of Africa is made to believe that our development comes from the West. We almost think everything of the West is beautiful and everything that is “us” must be westernised. Development and modernisation are “endogenous” – evolving from within and Europe herself transformed from within. This is what Alain Touraine, speaking on behalf of UNESCO, said in 1988. Why should Africa search herself elsewhere rather than within herself?
long before Christ the greatest teacher. That time, China was already a great a story before America and Europe.Aid will not develop Africa. We will develop Africa. Donors will not develop Malawi. We the people will develop our beloved country. And we will build Malawi with our hands. Some South Africans think we are the
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| China Town |
trash of their society because we have not stayed home to build our country.
Many intellectuals, those who should have taught us otherwise, think South Africa, the Tswana land and the land of the Swazi are the heavens of Africa. So they flee their beautiful motherland in search of greener pastures. Yet, we had no choice but to be born Malawian and we have no choice but to serve our country. That is why the Members of Parliament who play hide and seek with the lives of Malawians sound accursed every time they invoke disorder in the house of laws.Politicians alone will not develop Malawi, but we together can develop the country. Having served at the highest in European politics as French President, General Charles de Gaulle knew better when he said, "Politics is too serious a game to be left to politicians." Political leaders will not tell our story. We owe our existence to no one but ourselves, and rising with a story of hope is our collective and sacred call. We cannot afford to keep calling Africa The Wretched of the Earth because our children will believe that they are so wretched that they cannot develop.
Yet, there are many prophets of doom and scribes who get thrilled with telling the darker side of our story. The more we do that, the more our children lose hope in our generation. The more we think we cannot develop, the more we cannot develop indeed. Such is the power of thought. Humans are made of their thoughts, and this is what the wonderful writer of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie says.
Yes, I never agreed with Stanley Kenani when his column once outlined the many reasons “Why Africans Cannot Develop”. His crime is that he had dared imply that we cannot develop, and all he sought us to know was “why”. I said, the only reason why we are not developing is because we think we cannot develop.
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Quotes.
I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator. Richard Branson
A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it. George W. Bush
Surely, the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his story-teller. The rise of the British Empire began with their own story, which favoured them. They went around convincing us that they are the best of humanity. They elevated themselves first, and the prestige of English tells the story. Unlike all other languages, “they [the English] always write their first pronoun I with a capital letter,” says Robert Southey in Letters from England.
Then came a time when the Americans told us they have the biggest everything in the world. Freedom, wealth and fame were advertised as the heart of the American dream but that had to be won by thrift and hard work. They lived hardworking as a culture and they believed in it like all those who have risen to the heights social progress.
It is blasphemy to think of Blacks as incapable of hard work because God
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| The great pyramid of Giza |
never created a single lazy race in his image. It was incredible hard work for Egyptians to build the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza alone has more than 2.3 million stones weighing 2.5 tons each on average, yet moved across miles of desert and placed with extreme precision until this “First Wonder of the World” towers 138m high. Cheikh Anta Diop writes that Civilisation of Ancient Egypt that invented writing (which Greeks and Romans only refined into the alphabet you are reading now), geometry, architecture, the calendar and was made of Black people and not those Arabs who occupied it thousands of years later.
The roots of European and American civilisations came from these intelligent Black people via the Greeks who copied much from Egypt. But because the story of the world is told by the West, the proverb of the Akan people has become true. The story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. A story is tasted by the tongue of he who tells it. That is what we must tell our story, the story of Malawi.
The story of Africa has mostly been a Euro-American story about us. Before the first European stepped his foot on Africa, so they say, this Africa had no history. Hugh Trevor-Roper is arrogantly blunt, “there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”.
They saw darkness, not because it was dark, but they saw darkness anyway. Remember Confucius – “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it.” Joseph Conrad simply concluded that Africa was a Heart of Darkness and proceeded to write a novel in that name. The rest of us were invisible.
But the story of the Invisible Man written by Ralph Ellison speaks of wisdom otherwise. The indivisible story-teller of this novel begins, “I am an invisible man…simply because people refuse to see me…That invisibility…occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes with whom I come in contact. [It is a] matter of construction of their inner eyes.”
Therefore seen Under Western Eyes – a story told by George Orwell, what could be seen in Africa was the jungle and some creatures that resembled humans. Today, the story of Heart of Darkness is repeated with fanfare and without shame. When most Europeans and Americans think of touring Africa, they come for the safari, to see the jungle and the animals. The humans of Africa are almost invisible – and the way tourism advertises Africa repeats the story of Africa as a Heart of Darkness because we highlight the beauty of the animals and jungles more than the story of the people and our abilities to civilise more.
While Europe was going through its Dark Ages, Africa was going through unprecedented civilization of beautiful and well organised cities, trading with China, India and Persia between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. China could exchange even diplomats with the rulers on the coast of Tanzania.
Yet, one man ignorantly says “Africa is an ahistoric continent [without history that is]…The people live in a condition of mindlessness and barbering without laws and morality.” His name was Friedrich Hegel, followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said “The black people are incapable of thinking in any reflexive manner”. Both of these are drunk by our university students as great thinkers, philosophers who failed to reason objectively about Africa.
We may laugh when the animals in a story called Animal Farm form a society based on one belief – “All animals are equal” only to change their own constitution to read “All animals are equal, but some more equal than others”. Well, there have been times when some Malawians were more equal than others. continued here