Cultural Robbery

By JENERALI ULIMWENGU (email the author)

If there is something that has done greater damage to the African than even the most brutal forms of physical and material abuse, it is the mental enslavement, the utter psychological annihilation, the cultural strangulation and the spiritual emasculation that foreign invaders visited on us, and which we have apparently agreed to perpetuate.

The foreign marauders, whose intentions toward Africa have always been, and continue to be dishonourable, did everything they could to plunder everything of material value, employing guile and ruse, cajolery and subterfuge, but ever ready to employ massive, disproportionate force at the slightest hint of African resistance. Then they mowed down Africans as if they were flies and moved on their conquering march with clear consciences.

A few of these barbarous acts have been chronicled, and in this way we get to learn of the terrible fates of the Herero of Namibia, the Ndebele of Zimbabwe, the Gikuyu of Kenya, the Makonde of Mozambique and the Bakongo of Angola and Congo. But these were perhaps the most egregious of a generalised criminal enterprise, which spread right across the continent.

The physical brutality was real enough, and its effects in terms of people killed and material wealth destroyed, appropriated and externalised were catastrophic. But these fade in importance when considered against what the African psyche suffered. We were not the first people in history to be taken into slavery: Yarns of Ben Hur, or a gang of escapees willing the Red Sea to part, tell us that slavery was there ever since one group of men found the means of lording it over another.

That’s why the man with the ferrous filings on his head, Don King, could afford to say, “Ain’t nothing ever was wrong with slav’ry; it was a matter of eekaanamiks.” Of course it was, but the fact is we weren’t the first victims, although we seem determined to remain the only ones still around.

It’s our spiritual destruction that hurts to this day. The foreign invader extracted our spirit from our forebears and appropriated it, then made the zombies he had created work for him (which was bad) and worship him (which was calamitous). He gave us his names: Don King should probably be called Mobutu Sese Seko, a kindred spirit, and Jesse Jackson would be, say, Umfundisi Siyabonga, an African in America.

What’s in a name, you will ask, and I will tell you never to put your trust in what the English forked tongues say, for they are the same people who said something about giving a dog a bad name and hanging him. Seriously, of all the races that were kidnapped, lured, deceived, bribed or starved (remember the Irish?) into making the passage to America, only Africans shed their names. How many of them must be envying that Luo boy in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Obama sounds just as good as Negroponte, MacNamara or Schwarzenegger.

The shedding of our names and the adoption of strange names goes with other attitudes, such as the feeling that we cannot do anything to better our lot without foreign assistance; the belief that even our resources can only have value if we hand them to the foreigner, who will then give us whatever he thinks we deserve.

Our self-derision has taken on drastic forms. Of course there are too many negative things that carry the adjective black, so our people want things to be white: Their skins (which they bleach at the risk of depleting the protective dermis; two African presidents in Malabo recently looked bleached); we prefer very white maize flour, which even the rats in our granaries don’t eat because it has no nutrients; we say our heart is “white” to mean we are happy or sincere.

Then in Johannesburg, a South African woman (formerly black) will swear to you she has never been to Africa. That’s what the white masters told her: Africa is north of the Limpopo, and you are lucky you don’t belong there.