One can criticize Colonialism, the West, Europe and in a vehement way without pouring into gutter populism. Unfortunately, some African elites or some African politicians, short of arguments and in need of publicity or popularity, have this easy temptation to make amalgams and to put everything on the backs of Westerners. And above all mainly on behalf of the former colonial powers. So much so that one is entitled to wonder what their responsibilities and those of their predecessors in the misfortunes of Africa are accountable for the disastrous socio-political situation of Black Africa today. So these Africans whose only business is to continue to manipulate their national public opinion at will, sometimes with the help of powers hostile to the West, have become, as Aimé Césaire would say, and I quote Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le Colonialisme): “The most common curse in this matter is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy, skilful in posing the problems badly in order to better legitimize the odious solutions that are brought to them”.
Yes, indeed, Africans have heaps of things to blame for all the colonial enterprises that have been carried out in Africa. It is, at the very least, indisputable. But what did the Africans themselves do before and after independence? And instead of asking the right questions, a certain intellectual and political elite is bent on repeating the same stratagem as the former Colonialists of whom Aimé Césaire tells us and which resonates in us for many years to come like a lookout.
For ulterior purposes or not, it is truly irresponsible on the part of Africans, in this case of Black Africa, to continue to gloss over Colonialism than to leave in 2022 many African rulers at the highest levels of States behave vis-à-vis their peoples who are the Ruled as Wardens of another era, and worse, Slavers. The word is not very strong, and it is not an exaggeration to say it. The worst thing too is when the new African leaders or the new African influencers try to make the African populations - ordinary citizens of any country - believe that the new allies who are worth a thousand and one times better than these Westerners who are the cause of all the misfortunes of Black Africa would help them to establish more livable regimes – a fortiori democratic ones – which they did not see fit to establish at home. We know what Democracy means to them...
The quest for Power or Leadership or even influence, here or there in Africa, must in no way allow certain Africans to take their national public opinion for a bunch of imbeciles for whom it would suffice to brandish the banner of defender of the collective memory against the Colonization or the Exploitation of man by man to make them walk behind. Like Panurge's sheep.
About Colonization, let's talk about it! As I thought I should recall in a book, if it is necessary to set oneself up as a victim of Colonization and its appalling consequences on Black Africa in particular, Africans should not forget that they are their own Ancestors, the ancient Egyptians who were the first to invent Colonization in the modern sense of the term as it is understood today. By subjugating many peoples around ancient Egypt – starting with the country of those from whom they descended, namely the ancient Nubians – and then from the land of Canaan to present-day Syria via all of Phoenicia. From the IVth Dynasty, around 2000 BC, as evidenced by the Fortress of Buhen, part of Nubia was occupied by ancient Egypt. With the impetuous Thutmose I, ancient Egypt completed its occupation of the entire North of ancient Nubia around 1500 BC.
But beyond this reminder of verifiable historical facts, Black Africa must definitely get out of its childish discourse and stop pouring into pure naivety by believing that the great victim of all colonization, all slavery, and all the neo-colonialisms it was – Europeans, Arabs, Turks, etc. – must mouth trumpets to trumpet it from all the rooftops for Sovereignty to be. No offense to some, it was one of the most illustrious Frenchmen who said it, in this case the former President of France, Charles de Gaulle: "States have no friends, they only have interests ". Black African countries must understand that they are at the heart of geopolitical and geostrategic issues and that they have no friends, they only have "friends". Who do not skimp on their own interests, even if it means devoting others to public scrutiny for allegedly appearing to be their greatest defenders.
Sovereignty, let's talk about it too! Unless completely obsessed with shameless hypocrisy, all Sovereignty begins first with the use of its own language as a vector of communication. And it is neither the substitution of the CFA Franc by the Eco, nor the dismissal of France from its former Colonies, nor the incantations in favor of a Pan-Africanism which remains to be reinvented (when we are unable to agree on the fundamental in the smallest of countries), neither…nor…and we can multiply the nor to infinity, they are not the ones that will give the countries of Black Africa the beginnings of any kind of Sovereignty. Already speaking one's own language is the beginning of Sovereignty to paraphrase a biblical passage well known to followers. Leaders of Black African Countries, do you really want Sovereignty?...What Sovereignty?...All the Sovereignty?...If so, the path has not even begun yet to hope one day to get there. The former President of France, François Mitterrand, puts it very nicely and rightly by declaring: “It hurts a people to the depths of itself to reach them in their culture and their language”. And the Quebec novelist, J.-Léopold Gagner, confirms this: “True patriotism is first and foremost the cult of one's language, the expression par excellence of one's personality”.
By Marcus Boni Teiga
