21/03/2020
WE ARE AFRICANS.
AFRICAN people are defined by our culture, land, and history. These are the fundamentals of our heritage. We constitute our civilisation and level of development.
African humanity is measured against Africans. Our culture, are the values that bind us together as a people.
These values are expressed in our languages. These were celebrated through our arts which include oral stories, proverbs, songs, music and dance.
Theses were preserved for posterity through various forms of representation such as sculpture, architecture and other forms of symbolism.
When we’re robbed of the fundamentals of our heritage, African cease to live as Africans. This is the secret that Europeans discovered early in their history of colonisation. As Marimba Ani says; they knew that culture contains the rules for thinking.
If you impose your culture on your victims you limit the creativity of their vision and destroy their ability to act in their own interest.
You prevent them from thinking in a manner that would lead them to authentic self-determination.
Intellectual decolonisation in Africa is, therefore, a prerequisite for successful political decolonisation and cultural reconstruction strategies.
This is so because to be truly liberated, Africans must come to know the nature of European thought and behaviour and understand the effect that Europe has had on our ability to think victoriously as Africans.
Only then would Africans be able to separate African thought from European thought and visualise a future that is not dominated by Europe.
