AFRICA, UNFINISHED AND RESTLESS
"Political independence is only the beginning. The true liberation of Africa will come when every African nation achieves economic independence, and the continent is free to determine its own destiny.”
Tom Somah
Colonialism did not leave quietly; it was dragged out, inch by inch, by people who had already decided they would be free long before the flags came down. When independence finally arrived, anthems were learnt overnight and Africa danced. She had earned that right, every step of it. But the borders she inherited had been stitched together by strangers who called their theft partnership, force wearing the mask of fellowship, and beneath the drumming there was already something else moving in the dust: a warning nobody had time to hear.
The heroes who paid for independence with their bodies left behind heirs who quarrelled over the throne. Old comrades lifted a strongman onto their shoulders, not knowing, or not caring, that he came with wolves who would help him deceive the very people who had raised him.
Self-rule slipped into the costume of
democracy while the old machinery remained agile. The foreign masters had gone.
The whip remained. New hands closed around it.
Honest citizens were shown the door, quietly, without ceremony, while loyalists took their seats at the desks of government and the police learned whose orders mattered more than the law.
Those who had expected freedom found themselves standing outside the gates of their own independence. Independence, it turned out, was not the same thing as freedom. It was only the paperwork.
Liberators hardened into rulers, and the hardening happened fast. Greed found its way into policy, theft into law, corruption into the ordinary business of government, until a party card could open doors that a lifetime of honest labour never would. Nepotism took the head of the table; tribalism pulled up a chair beside it. When one tribe was lifted, another learned overnight what it meant to be made a stranger in its own country. Dissenting voices simply stopped appearing. Brutality wore a uniform and presented itself as order, while frightened and exhausted nations were taught to accept it as necessary.
And the money left
It found its way out through suitcases and
numbered accounts, across borders and into vaults whose doors seemed to open
more readily for stolen wealth than for the poor countries it was stolen from.
Ministers flew abroad, hat in hand, to beg for loans against the very resources
their own governments had already sold twice over.
Since independence, too much of the continent has walked in circles while the rest of the world kept moving. And yet Africa was built for abundance. Her soil could feed nations. Her rivers could light cities while she sits, often, in the dark beside them. Still, a continent this rich in resources has stayed this poor in opportunity.
Africa stands before history with her hands still raw from building it, gifted, wounded, and, more than either, betrayed by people who looked like her.
Who, then, bears the blame?
The empire that wounded her, or the borders it
left behind, still trapping her decades after the flag came down? The rulers
who inherited the whip and simply renamed it government? Or the outside world,
which condemns the corruption it built the offshore accounts to receive?
The question won't die. It knocks on palace gates and on foreign banks alike, and on every conscience that has learned to live comfortably beside a stranger's hunger.
But a question, however just, does not feed a
child, and blame is a house Africa has been permitted to live in for far too
long, rent-free, and to no one's benefit.
The harder work begins elsewhere. It begins with the young.
Let us wash from their minds the oldest lie
left by the slave trade and colonial rule, that Africa cannot stand unless a
Western hand is holding her up, and teach them instead that greatness did not
begin in Europe, and civilisation was never a European export.
Tell them about the builders of ancient Egypt, who organised labour, engineering and resources on a scale that still commands the imagination of the world, without a single modern machine to make the work easier. Tell them about Timbuktu, where scholars and manuscripts converged from across West Africa and beyond, and whose libraries testify that intellectual life on this continent did not begin when European ships arrived.
And tell them this too: that many of the nations now held up as models of progress built part of their wealth on systems of trade, labour and extraction in which Africa was deeply entangled, and often exploited.
There is something else they need to hear:
Nations rise.
Within living memory, China was poorer than
many of the countries to which it now lends. Singapore had barely any land,
almost no natural resources, and no hinterland to draw on.
Switzerland did not grow rich because its mountains happened to be full of gold. It grew rich through institutions, discipline, knowledge and the determination to make something out of what was available.
Progress was never a miracle reserved for other people. Africa's children need to hear that until it stops sounding like encouragement and starts sounding like fact.
The builders of the pyramids asked nobody's
permission to be great.
Neither should their children.
Africa, arise. Stand tall. You were never made to kneel.