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Literature Discussion - Lit-Talk.com
At the Core of Africa's Problems
by Akinyi Princess of K’Orinda-Yimbo (Germany)
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(With permission, from the "The Long Shadows of Time," www.african-times.com)
At the core of Africa’s problems are the Africans themselves. No other group has been as physically and psychologically brutalized by strangers for all of 500 years. The end is nowhere in sight. Slavery has been practiced throughout human history, also between homogeneous groups. But for Africans, after slavery came colonization. This experience was more traumatizing than slavery. Strange people appeared out of nowhere to take the land – the people’s highest religious symbol. There was no stopping them; a handful could kill 10,000 warriors in a matter of hours.
It was survival not of the physically fittest but of the militarily mightiest. It took Africans time to recover and think up strategies and tactics against the victors’ military might. Then, just as independence dawned, Africans were latched into the toughest chains ever: dictators appointed by the ex-colonialists. These were kleptocratic, corrupt candidates without merit. The pattern was sculpted in marble.
These processes were inconsistent, abrupt, capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable and cripplingly intense. Africans sustained severe and irreversible setbacks, irreparable without concerted efforts made to revert them.
In the sociological sense, Africans have emerged through all this with a collective inferiority complex. The African elite feel inferior to nearly all other cultures and peoples, and are afflicted with a pathological desire to overcompensate by spectacularly achieving or by adopting extremely antisocial behavior. There is no denying the fact that Africans tend to have negative self-esteem and self-worth fluctuating between over-evaluation and devaluation of themselves and of others. Most cannot deal with criticism, failures, disillusionment, setbacks or disappointment, basing their self-image largely on outside events like subordination, absolutism, Swiss bank accounts, domains in England and castles all over Europe. They turn arrogant, haughty, paranoid and sadistic. The dissonance breeds the desire to remain in the world of fantasy, grandiosity and entitlement. Ultimately, they engage in a feverish search for unconditional admiration. Whatever they undertake is done from a position of omnipotence.
How did the Africans catch this contagion?
Slavery brought Africans to cultivate a mentality of self-negation. Their skin color eventually spelled slavery and slavery was the prerequisite for this pigmentation. Their monarchs, their nobility, religious and military dignitaries were overwhelmed by a military superiority they were powerless against. These pillars of their society could now protect neither their people nor themselves.
When it was not their monarchs and dignitaries, it was their children, spouses, parents and siblings. Those left behind were either weak, sick, crippled or hardly out of infancy. They did not know how long they themselves would remain free, left with no spiritual, medicinal, political or military organizations worth relying on. They blindly roamed around their vast continent in an attempt to survive. Most continental Africans thus embarked on building temporary settlements and practicing a life of mere subsistence. Not only the stranger who crossed your path but also your general merchant, your neighbor or your ruler was a potential enemy and was not to be trusted. Those who had sought a settled life with central organizations were forced into a nomadic existence, always penetrating inland in order to survive. They mutilated their bodies or the bodies of their children to make them look unattractive or weak to the slavers.
Personalities could not thrive where mistrust had such vast influence.
Now the worst human relationships took root: the defeated African always met the victorious European in an attitude of self-negation, subservience and inferiority. To this minute, when African leaders sit with Euro-ancestral leaders on conference tables, the African self-doubt is a screaming aura around them. Most Africans’ composure becomes labored and their carriage cramped. The word civilization rings alarming bells in their psyches, reminding them that their own civilization had not been good enough to move forward, so why bother with it. The Africans are not at ease, in the psychological sense. This happens involuntarily because it is buried deep in their souls.
The triumphant European, on the other hand, always met the defeated African with an attitude of self-assertion, self-esteem, lordliness and superiority. Europeans were always the superhuman and the Africans forever mere objects or at best subhuman. Civilized Afro-Oriental Christian values, helplessly squeezed in the stranglehold of the new Euro-ancestral fist, had no room for an alternative. In the embryonic Christendom that had to function with a military strait jacket, faith had to have a flexible morality conducive to human greed.
Today, if the rest of the world’s population consumed as much as the wealthy West does, humankind would need five Planet Earths. There is a thin line between cunning, manipulative socio- and psychopathic behavior and the narcissistic. To the Euro-ancestrals, the Age of Enlightenment was a Jekyll and Hyde milestone. They classified everything, labeling their pink complexion white. Then came the downgrading of yellow, red, brown and black. Humankind has inborn negative associations with the color black. It is reminiscent of the primordial days.
Those with mixed backgrounds like U.S. President Barack Obama miraculously turn their 50 percent pink coloration black. This was and is a psychological booby-trap set up to keep on ensnaring Afro-ancestrals with a constant confirmation of their “evilness.” While no one is better at setting up such psychological booby-traps than the Euro-ancestrals, no one is better at the servility required to meekly accept such a subtly corrosive, damaging notion than Afro-ancestrals. They have been religiously passing on this corrosive notion to their progenies over centuries. One embryonic branch of humankind’s divisive, disordered, dysfunctional behavior has now permeated the entire species like a terminal virus. “All cruelty springs from weakness,” said Seneca. He certainly did not mean physical weakness.
– Akinyi Princess of K’Orinda-Yimbo’s book “Darkest Europe and Africa’s Nightmare. A Critical Observation of Neighboring Continents” was published in 2008 by Algora Publishing, New York.
