Flush White Disk From African Memory

Kwame Nkrumah speaking at the Organization of African Unity Summit in 1964 in Egypt calling for a continental unity government for Africa. 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of his birth., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

AFRICAN FOCUS: Flush white disk from African memory .

Saturday, 28 May 2011 23:08
By Tafataona Mahoso
Zimbabwe Sunday Mail

The purpose of white soft power is to aid the brute power of imperialism. The white world can do what it wants with Africa once the African disk is filled with white memory.

As Africans were preparing to mark Africa Day, May 25 1963, which is the day of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity — US President Barack Obama was busy rebranding himself in Ireland as an Irish descendant and French President Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurating Alassane Ouattara President of Cote d’Ivoire in that country.

These events pictured the symbolic levels of the gravest security threat which Africa faces since the 1884 Berlin Conference and the partition of Africa.

In 1883 one of the North American founders of the Nazi doctrine published an essay in the magazine Popular Science Quarterly warning whites in North America that if they did not do something drastic about the African-American population in North America, they would be outnumbered and over-powered by blacks by 1980, that is, within a century from the writing of the essay.

E. W. Gilliam’s essay therefore advocated the extermination of Africans in North America in order to save the white race. This was followed in 1913 by Edward Eggleston’s book, The Ultimate Solution, also advocating the extermination of Africans in North America. Hitler’s Final Solution was an imitation of its North American precursors.

But the rulers of the white West could not afford to exterminate the entire African population among themselves because their entire civilisation was built by stealing African labour and African resources.

For this reason, imperialism as white capitalism has invented more effective, more profitable ways of managing “the black peril”. That method is “soft power”, that is, filling the African disk with white memory.

In the last instalment I pointed out that the intense hatred of African elders by some brain-washed young Africans today is a manifestation of self-hatred arising from the white memory which has filled the African disk.

I pointed out that the very same young Africans who condemn African elders for being around too long, the very same African youngsters who despise their own ancestors, have, in fact, adopted Anglo-Saxon aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers who may also be their cash cows or donors and patrons.

Quite a number of African countries, including Kenya, celebrated the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the US White House as President of the United States of America. They hoped against hope that Barrack Obama was going to be the voice of Africa at the heart of the empire. In Zimbabwe there are also white-sponsored parties who still see Obama as their potential saviour.

And when I wrote in the last instalment about some African youths or African-looking youths who denigrate their own grandmothers and grandfathers while adopting the Queen of England as a substitute grandmother and grand patron — I had no idea that Barrack Obama was going to have tea with the same queen and go hunting for his white ancestors in Ireland.

I had no idea that Nicolas Sarkozy would actually dare go to Cote d’Ivoire to be pictured on TV with his stooge Alassane Ouattara. Soft power works. The African disk is full of white memory! It was not just the fund-raisers for Obama’s election who were white.

Obama’s software is also primarily Anglo-Saxon. That software is spawning many sell-outs.

In the place of the Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Haile Selassie, Julius Nyerere, Sekou Toure and others — we now have the clans to Tshombe, a long chain of African disks and chips filled with white memory and white hatred of African independence and sovereignty: Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, James McGee, Alassane Ouattara, Jestina Mukoko, Beatrice Mtetwa,

Charles Ray, Stenford Moyo, Jean Ping and the judges of the recently discredited and disbanded “Sadc Tribunal!”

The white empire has developed excellent expertise for choosing its black diskettes and masks. They are almost everywhere. But they are so easy to expose because they expose themselves. When the disk is full, it can no longer hide what it is full of.

Barack Obama started by going to Ghana and visiting the monstrous dungeons and prisons in which African captives were stored on the coast of Ghana before being shipped as slaves to the Americas.

But it did not take long before Obama was forced to add his own atrocities on top of those of the white ancestors: bombing Libya, renewing George W. Bush’s illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe, continuing the 50-year-old blockade and persecution of Cuba and extending the global aggression of Nato against international peace.

What the African Disk Should Contain, What Africa Day Means To Africans

Why do Anglo-Saxon donors fund projects in African constitution-making and African elections? The war for African resources cannot be won unless it is fought in tandem with the war for African values and ideas.

This is where the AU Commission has failed us. It is an African disk full of white commands.

In a recent paper, Professor Issa Shivji of the University of Dar es Salaam’s School of Law quoted Amilcar Cabral, Archie Mafeje and Frantz Fanon to demonstrate that African leaders must rise in a world and context where the ground has been undercut and paved over by imperialism. They therefore have to reclaim African ground by unpaving the Cape to Cairo tarmac left by Cecil Rhodes and his descendants.

According to Professor Shivji: Cabral also makes the point that “so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent”.

These are profound insights. “First (African) nationalism is constituted by the struggle of the people against imperialism, thus anti-imperialism defines African nationalism.

Second, nationalism, as an expression of (African) struggle, continues so long as imperialism exists.

Third, the (African) National Question in Africa, whose expression is nationalism (and which makes African leadership necessary), remains unresolved as long as there is imperialist domination.”

But if the white man has defined humanity in terms dysselection based on biology, technology and contractual rights, how does the African define humanity? The African does not substitute tools for morality and values. Technology is not ethics.

African Relational Ethics

The white man’s Eurocentric localisation of humanity which he calls globalisation leads to narcissism; and Narcissus is the enemy of African Relational Ethics, because he cannot relate. Instead of relating, Narcissus or Europe’s man goes as far as Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. The African, in contrast, chooses his or her leaders from within the dariro where the opposite dictum is the foundation and context of leadership.

“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” “I relate therefore I am.” “I am who I am because of who we are.”

In being relational, African relational philosophy and ethics is the origin of environmental or ecological ethics, with emphasis being on the ecology or the environment as a nexus of relationships.

The African differs most profoundly from the European not because of the obvious physical and biological features or the fetishised technologies, but because of his or her relationships throughout our history.

The Bible itself expresses the Judeo-Christian debt to the African relational ethics of Egypt when it tells us: In Ruka 2:40: Nomwana (Jesu) wakakura, akagwinya, anoungwaru, nenyasha dza Mwari dzaiva padera pake.

In Ruka 2:52: Na Jesu wakakura muungwaru nokudikana ndi Mwari nevanhu. The leader, the teacher, leads and teaches because he has a deep relationship with God and the povo.

African relational ethics assume that it is diametrically opposed to the linear and Cartesian doctrine which derives from and leads to narcissism. The two systems of human conceptions are based on diametrically opposed assumptions about knowledge, society, social reality and leadership in society.

African relational theory demands that existing relations and their full contexts be examined as a basis for describing, explaining, evaluating, justifying or condemning leaders and their practices.

If we read David Lan’s book on the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, we see that Lan comes to realise that the liberation movement on which the Government of the new Zimbabwe was based in 1980 was deeply entrenched within and among the rural communities as a legitimate government of the people.

In the book, Guns and Rain, Lan discovers for himself and for the British that the new state built by the liberation movement has succeeded because it has connected the three mapfiwa of legitimacy in the rural African community. It has linked the spirit media, the mambo (chief), and the mhondoro.

Unfortunately, Lan saw the creation of these relations as a linking of lines. It is best to see it as an intersection of spheres or circles of relational power which produce a new reality where they all meet.

The legitimacy of African leadership derives from its capacity to remember or reconnect relationships disrupted and disconnected by the evil forces of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism and neo-colonialism.

So, where the white man sees human civilisation as entering Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave of “progress”, the African simply examines the relationships Africans have been forced to endure and the relationships which they now must build for themselves.

But first, let us look at Alvin Toffler’s typology of the ascent of man.

The Third Wave, Toffler reduces human civilisation to three basic and “inevitable revolutions”.

For him, these define the essence of humanity. These are:

The invention of agriculture;
The discovery and invention of industrial production; and
The discovery and invention of information and communication technology.

From these, we hear even African scholars such as Professor Ali Mazrui accepting the notion that we are now just entering:

The Space Age;
The Information Age;
The Global Village;
The Electronic Age;
The Knowledge Age;
The Technotronic Age;
The Post-industrial Society; and
The Age of Communication.

We are told that it is this new millennium which promises to heal the fundamental alienation of the last millennium between the producer and the consumer, to give rise to the “prosumer”.

The equivalent of this myth of man here was that by merely preaching reconciliation in Zimbabwe in 1980, we should be able to convert the British settlers who stole our land from land thieves to “willing sellers”, while the African dispossessed would turn into “willing buyers”.

African Historiography and the Bases of African Leadership

African leadership philosophy accepts Leila Ghandi’s conclusion in Post-Colonial Theory that any leader in the South and East who adopts Renç Descartes’ narcissistic dictum “I think, therefore I am”, will, in fact, end up with a much worse derivative which reduces him to what Professor Shivji calls the mere transmission line for marketing imperialist ideals to the South and East: “I think where I am not; therefore I am always where I cannot think.” Therefore the white baas should think for me; set benchmarks for me.

In order for Africans to think properly and relationally, they have to examine the full curriculum and history of the African experience, as follows.

The discovery of symbolic representation, language and human expressions, the build-up and sophistication of the African symbolising capacity which we see in ancient Egyptian literature and monuments such as the pyramids and Great Zimbabwe. Therefore the knowledge age is not the same thing as the proliferation of the computer.

Long, long ago, the Prophet Hosea (4:6) reflected the Jewish debt to ancient Egyptian wisdom and ethics when he wrote:
“My people perish for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee . . . .”

The discovery of the ethics and morality of family life, kinship, solidarity and co-operation.

The discovery of early civilisation in which the ethics and morality of kinship, inter-communal solidarity and co-operation produce collective skills, collective capacities and technologies of representation, agricultural science, architectural science, large-scale mobilisations of human capacity with multiplier effects through government, trade, diplomacy and cultural exchange.

The first coming of the barbarians, the first major disruption and dislocation of African relationships through the slave holocaust and translocation to America via the middle passage.

This slave holocaust gave rise to the trans-Atlantic struggle to abolish slavery, with many possibilities for international solidarity and Pan-African co-operation between the continent and the new forced diaspora. This gave us Queen Nzinga, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth and others.

The second coming of the barbarians, being the imposition of colonialism and apartheid

The first struggle against the barbarians on the African continent, being the era of the First Chimurenga which gave us Bambata, Kaguvi, Mapondera and Nehanda.

The Second Chimurenga, a widening Pan-African struggle against the myths of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and universal path to development. This struggle culminates in the recognition of the African liberation movement and the International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crimes of Apartheid.

The Third Chimurenga, being the current struggle against a globalising, neoliberal apartheid offering a tiny African elite cyber-space and globe-trotting NGO junkets as superior substitutes for tangible assets and land space.

Here the Africans are reclaiming the control of:

Real land space;
Autonomy;
Sovereignty;
Strategic minerals;
Strategic energy sources.

National and Pan-African media management and media content; and South to South co-operation

Therefore, the legitimate African leader earns his/her authority and legitimacy by assisting society to achieve three basic ethical objectives in the pursuit of knowledge or in education and three basic objectives in the defence of human life.

Three Basic Ethical Objectives in Pursuit of Knowledge

Therefore the purpose of unhu as a teaching project is to achieve the following:

Teaching the children, in word and in practice, the difference between what is good or moral and what is bad or immoral.

Teaching the children the difference between what exists and what does not exist.

Teaching the children the difference between what is possible and what is impossible.

The Three Fundamental Objectives in Defence of Life, not Rights

Insuring the survival of the body, the individual, the family, the community, the nation and humankind. Survival is related to the body.

Protecting, defending the autonomy of the individual, the family, the community and the nation through the cultivation and defence of mutually reinforcing relationships, where evil or sin is the creation, perpetuation and extension of harmful relationships. Autonomy is related to ownership and control of tangible space and tangible assets.

Creating and promoting relations of solidarity through the establishment and protection of African institutions and movements.

Solidarity is related to institutions and movements.

-The Sunday Mail