Problems facing Africa and the Black Race
One of the major setbacks to our development on the continent is excessive religious beliefs by our ancestors, leading to extreme spiritualism and superstition with massive prayers and libations that never solved the continent’s problems.
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This attitude heightened time wasting, neglecting technology application and scientific methodology in solving our problems as a race. This mannerism has permeated the new generation of religious worshippers on the continent where everything is converted into worship, making us religiously mesmerised and hypnotised, thus keeping the continent/black race indefinitely backward and further precipitating the gap between the white race and us. We have become whirling dervishes and prisoners of religion indeed.
Any serendipitous happening within the black race is attributable to spiritualism, thus associated with unceasingly worshipping and praying. Excessive worship/prayers can never resolve our negativity and naivety as a race; remove the filth/ noise around us, refine malnutrition deficiencies from our diet and bad socio– economic behavioural attitude that lower our life expectancy.
No amount of prayers can pass examinations or win any major international tournament except through serious studies and adequate preparation. No amount of prayers can restructure our ailing economies for better, making us develop or advance except through hard work, truism and positive attitudinal change by eradicating illiteracy and ignorance from our midst.
The albatross of religious beliefs
The continent is extremely fixated on religious beliefs, like a dog glued to the bone, that we tend to forget most important issues of life, contented with peripherals and mediocrity turning us into mere entertainers on the globe. This extreme religious attitude breeds high-level laziness as we use excessive worship/prayers as veneer/mascot to accelerate success depicting double standards. Our Maker is interested in cleverness, hard work and not foolishness or laziness. Laziness is a crime against humanity and sin against God.
Love charm
During my years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US, I met an Afro-American woman who was in love with an Ethiopian student. She travelled to Kenya with the student’s shirt for charm to attract his love. According to her, it worked only for a short while so she came to solicit my help to visit Ghana on her ticket for a stronger charm as she heard Ewes were powerful spiritually.
No matter where you locate the black race, this extreme spiritualism/superstition exists. We continually engage in religious innovations, while the white race innovates most important concerns and consequently dominate us. Whether we worship and pray relentlessly or not, once we adhere to certain basic natural principles of life, we will achieve greatness. These principles include hard work, good planning, foresight and utmost discipline.Discipline is the supreme command from the Creator, therefore, whosoever adheres to this supreme command seeks the Creator’s favour. With all our excessive worshiping/prayers, we inevitably remain scarecrows and unwanted elements on the globe and yet nobody seems to have solutions.
Unfortunately, Europeans also came to augment the woes of Africans/ black race by capitalising on our naivety and ignorance to achieve their goal. The impact of the European civilisation on the African continent brought enlightenment, Western style education and appreciable level of development. However, these attainments diminished to the barest due to the negative impacts and trauma the Africans/black race suffered from the interaction. These negative impacts were slavery, partitioning/demarcation of Africa, Western pattern governance and borrowed religions.
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Slavery as a heinous crime
Slavery is the most heinous crime and sin ever committed by man against man in modern history that has not attracted condemnation from our comity of nations/the United Nations. Atrocities committed against the black race by Europeans were worse than the genocide against the Jews during the World War II for which atonement has been sort. Following this atrocious slavery was the demarcation and partitioning of Africa done impetuously without cause for appropriate reason. This excruciating pain of partitioning inflicted on the African continent was without cognisance to the existence of various tribal groupings. Africa had, by nature, clearly demarcated itself tribally using various rivers as borders. The Europeans for their own advantage that has proved disastrous for Africa, blatantly ignored these natural boundaries either covertly or overtly.
These are the starting points of the countless and intractable woes besieging the continent culminating in the prevalence of numerous conflicts. Slavery devalued and dehumanised the black race with its attendant racism, stigmatisation and ridicule. Partitioning of Africa indiscriminately has brought mistrust, tribalism and unwanted political chaos on the continent.
Borrowed religions from Western Europe and elsewhere have also seriously inflicted unending conflicts on the continent. These ploys, to my view, were perpetuated to keep Africa backward for million years to come because the different tribes grouped together artificially are philosophically/socially incongruent. In addition, our inability as a continent and race to control and manage these artificially implanted ideologies and demarcations never helped matters. This is an aposteriori of the secrete of Africa/black race condemnation and humiliation for which the Western World must be made to pay unlimited reparation and atonement.
Extremism and radicalisation
Boko Haram from Nigeria, Al Shabab from Somalia and other numerous extremist groups dotted all over the continent are the offspring of these outside ideological pressures imposed on the continent. These misleading actions from the West and other unfortunate pressure groups outside the continent have seriously devalued the black race with its associated innuendos. These extremism and radicalisation prevalent on the continent prove centrifugal, leaving the continent falling apart and the centre not holding. As written by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, in his book, The Dark Days in Africa, yes, truly, Africa has arrived at the dark days appropriately. We fight one another as brothers and sisters because of borrowed religions. We discriminate against one another because of artificial border demarcations. The problems facing Africa are so enormous that we need the attention of all and sundry. We are in a global village where pain from a neighbour will definitely affect the other. When Europe was on fire during the world wars, the whole world was in pain and African soldiers helped to fight in solidarity with their colonial masters to liberate them. Therefore, if Africa is on fire, the whole world negatively benefits from severe retrogression and pain, so all hands must be on deck for solution.
We in Africa have more to contribute in curbing this menace by engaging in brotherly dialogue with equality and understanding by avoiding unpleasant leadership attributes that can trigger insurgencies. We can reason logically to reverse the trend positively to our advantage to show case Dr Nkrumah’s assertion that black man is capable of ruling himself the and even do better than under colonialism. Africans must turn to be renegades to use logical minds to reject imported ideologies that will not be beneficial to the continent to move the continent forward. For instance, Great Britain colonised Malaysia, India, United Arab Emirates and many more elsewhere, of which some have become more developed in infrastructure than Britain itself, because they did not allow the colonialist’s ideological thinking to be imposed on them. Africa’s situation is rather the inversion where everything from the colonial master was accepted robotically leading to extreme deprivation and wretchedness.
We all need to be one another’s keeper, otherwise inevitable doom looms large on Africa.
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