The Black African Identity

 

At times when I see the black man portray the values of the white man I realise that we have completely lost our identity. The more I grow the more I want to identify my real African identity without the white culture. I want the black culture.

Unfortunately society everywhere today has been fashioned along the white culture so if you want to practice your black culture you won’t survive. The work we even do today is white colour job. Without the white man’s formal education you won’t survive in this system.

Can you blame groups like Boko Haram and Al Qaeda whose main aim is to abolish the Western culture and introduce the Islamic culture? I don’t even want to tread on religious lines yet, I just want to focus on our culture, who we are as a people.

How did our ancestors survive this far with their way of living, something that is now regarded as primitive. I think primitiveness and culture itself evolves. Do you think our culture would not have grown if we had not adopted the white man’s way of living? And by the way, where did the white man find his own culture?

The white man has succeeded in developing its own culture to the level of technological advancement, why do you think the black man couldn’t also have developed his culture to a level may be called ‘africological’ advancement?

The point here is, whether by force or corhesion we have been made to abandon the pursuit of the developmental stages of our own culture to become learners of a white skin culture something we are not used to. When I see a black man talking and behaving like a white man I just laugh inside of me and I tell myself look at this miserable copy cat, you are completely lost you don’t know who you are and you are projecting another race’s way of living.

We need to go back to our roots and discover who we actually are as Africans and use that to fashion our society to suit us if we are going to make inroads. If you are running with a person on the sand and you run according to their footsteps on the ground you will never bypass them but if you develop and follow your own footsteps you might surpass them because when the one you are following fails you will inevitably fail as well.

Today everyone wants to go to Europe or America for greener pastures when we have so much good vegetation in our land. Africa is rich in both human and natural resources. Our lands are virgin lands and filled with all the good substance of the earth but we still depend on the white.

The other five continents cannot survive without the resources of Africa and that is why they are all trooping here. Japan is known not to have any national dependable natural resources but earthquakes and mountains but yet they have been able to develop their country so well along technological lines to an extent products from Japan are highly esteemed to be quality in terms of technology. Japanese have inculcated a culture of neatness and quality. This is what drives everything they do and it has been transformed to their economy. I am not talking about a whole continent but a country in Asia. All the best cars and home appliances comes from Japan. Speak of Honda, Toyota, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Yamaha etc. Everything Japan is quality because they understand their lack and they use their culture to make their production and economy better. Japan is the world's third strongest economy after USA and China.

Switzerland also has all the world's best financial institutions including International Monetary Fund and World Bank etc because they stick to their culture as a people of peace and serenity. I read they don't have a standing military only police because just like North Korea everyone goes through military service after college just like we do national service here in Ghana (a wonderful initiative though by government). We have not heard of Switzerland having the best of any form of natural resources but they stick to their know-how to develop. 

They are also the best producers of world class watches. When all the corrupt African leaders steal our monies, the place they go to hide it is in Swiss bank account. They also deliver world class airline services with their Swissair. This is what makes a nation or an economy grows and not over dependence on the Western world to an extent we copy everything they do including their culture.

If Africa does not strive to find itself as a continent and develop based on its culture and resources, we can never match up to the world competition and we are going to be at the same place all the time. We must use our media space to broadcast things that are African and sensitise the public about all our resources and what we can do with them. The resources of Africa must be managed and controlled by Africans and not those of the Western World. When you rent somebody's house you don't deplete the house by your activities, instead you stay, do your business and go your way. Africa has allowed so many foreign companies into our land and all they are doing is depleting our gold, timber, mangenese, bauxite, iron ore, ivory, crude oil, gold, diamond etc. Some of these resources are irreplaceable once they are exploited so till when are we going to allow these foreign companies to exploit us.

Now that we even have all these resources we still depend on the whites, what about when all our natural resources gets finished? At that point we will over depend on them. If care is not taken in the future the slave trade will be reinvented because there might nothing for Africans in Africa. 

Recently I chanced on pictures of Queen Elizabeth inspecting the gold reserves in Britain and I was amazed the volume of gold collected I know they are from African soil mostly. A friend told me gold is weighed in blades. The weight of a blade of gold he said is Ghs300 now so multiplied by the number of blades of gold it weighs determines the value of the entire gold. Looking at the gold reserve the queen was inspecting, the wealth alone will be unimaginable. Then I ask myself, do we have this much gold reserve in Ghana and Africa too, it is sad. He then told me the gold reserve in Ghana Obuasi can last us another 200 years. 200 years of mining and do you know how much gold they mine daily? And I told him, who gave you that 200 years projection and he said well by the gold mining companies. And I asked him are they whites or blacks, he said they are whites. I told him, brother the white man will deceive you with statistics to make you think you have so much gold that can last you another twenty years. You will be surprised when after some few years they tell you, you have no gold or crude oil so we are now leaving your country if they don't even engineer war for you and spoil you totally. Our great grandchildren will now be plunged into modern slavery something that is already happening. You can see the pictures of gold reserve UK has gathered and where do you think they got all this gold from? What is the gold deposit strength of Britain to have this much stock pile of gold? We refuse to learn as a people and be wise instead we fight ourselves and pull each other down so continuously we will remain beggars

I want to conclude by saying God cannot bless a continent beyond the use of it's resources, culture and the use of our senses to develop as a continent. It's about time we go back to the narratives and make correction as a people where we have faulted and make the necessary corrections otherwise those who will come after us will suffer. If our forefathers without education couldn't think this far but sold our birth rights to the white man like Esau sold his right to Jacob then we who have now been elightened through education if we also allow this exploitation to continue then indeed it means we are the greater fools. 

There is more I want to write about Africa but I know our people don't like reading so suffice this for now. I will release the information in bits and in pieces as much is digestible and containable.