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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 by people who had
decided they would be free. Flags rose; anthems were learnt overnight. Africa
danced, and she had earned the right to dance. But the borders she inherited
had been stitched by strangers, force masquerading as fellowship. Beneath the
drums of freedom, warnings were already stirring in the dust.
Our heroes who paid for independence left behind heirs who quarrelled
over the throne. Old comrades lifted a strongman onto their shoulders. He came
with wolves at his back and would deceive the very people who raised him.
Self-rule slipped into the costume of democracy while the machinery of the old
order kept turning. The foreign masters had gone; the whip remained, and new
hands closed around it.
Honest citizens were shown the door. Loyalists took their seats at the
desks of government. The police learned whose orders mattered. Those who had
expected freedom found themselves standing outside the gates of their own
independence. The oppressed, with nowhere left to carry their wounds, learned
the hardest lesson of all: independence is not the same as freedom.
Liberators hardened into rulers. Greed found its way into policy, theft
into law, and corruption into the daily business of government. A party card
opened doors that a lifetime of honest work could not. Nepotism took the head
of the table; tribalism sat beside it. When one tribe was lifted, another was
made to feel the ground shift beneath its feet.
Men who ruled by the gun arrived, promising order, discipline, and
renewal. They brought repression instead. Deals were struck in the dark:
protect me, and I will protect you. Prisons filled with the innocent. Critics
were branded terrorists. Voices disappeared, sometimes overnight, and were
never heard again. Brutality was presented as order and sold to a frightened
nation as necessary.
And the money left.
It always seemed to find a way out—in quiet suitcases, through secret
accounts, across borders, and into banks whose doors opened more readily to
stolen wealth than to the poor countries from which it came. Ministers
travelled abroad to plead for loans against the very resources their
governments had squandered.
Since independence, much of Africa has seemed to walk in circles
while the rest of the world moves forward. But Africa was made for flourishing.
Her soil can feed nations. Her rivers can light cities while she perishes in
darkness. Her people, battered but unbroken, have never stopped working,
creating, and dreaming.
Still, a continent rich in resources has remained poor in opportunity.
The house of promise stands beneath a leaking roof.
Africa stands before history—gifted, wounded, and betrayed.
Who, then, bears the blame?
The empire that wounded her? The borders that trapped her? The rulers
who inherited the whip and called it government? The citizens who were silenced
into submission? The outside world that condemns corruption while profiting
from the weakness it helps to preserve?
The question refuses to die. It knocks on palace gates, on foreign banks, and on every conscience that has learnt to live comfortably beside another
people's suffering.
But a question, however just, does not feed a child. Blame is a house in which Africa has lived for too long.
The harder work begins elsewhere.
We must begin with the young.
Let us wash from their minds the oldest lie of the slave trade and
colonial rule: that Africa can never stand unless a Western hand holds it up.
We must teach them that greatness did not begin with Europe and that
civilisation is not a Western invention.
We should tell them about the builders of the pyramids. Without
computers, cranes, or modern machinery, they raised monuments that still command the world's imagination. We must tell them about Timbuktu, where scholars
travelled across the Sahara to study, teach, and exchange ideas centuries before
European powers arrived, claiming to bring civilisation.
We must tell them, too, that many of the countries now praised as models
of wealth and development were enriched, directly or indirectly, by systems
that drew labour and resources from Africa.
There is something else we must tell them.
Nations rise.
Within living memory, China was poorer than many of the countries to
which it now lends. Singapore had little land, few natural resources, and no
hinterland to rely upon. Switzerland did not become prosperous because its
mountains were overflowing with gold. It built its wealth through institutions,
discipline, knowledge, enterprise, and, above all, the determination to make
something of what was available.
Progress is not a miracle reserved for other people.
Africa's children must hear that often enough for it to become instinct.
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.