“It seems that, in certain circles, they pretended to discover in me an “enemy of Europe” and a prophet of a return to the pre-European past. For my part, I seek in vain where I could hold such speeches; where I have been seen to underestimate the importance of Europe in the history of human thought; where I was heard preaching some kind of return; where I was seen pretending that there could be a return.
The truth is that I said something quite different: to know that the great historical drama of Africa was less its belated contact with the rest of the world than the way in which this contact was made; that it was when Europe fell into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry that Europe “spread”; that our misfortune wanted it to be this Europe that we encountered on our way and that Europe is accountable to the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history”. Says Aimé Césaire in his memorable and sublime work Discours sur le colonialisme (Speech on colonialism).
The evolution of people, human groups, Societies, Countries, Nations and Continents is always inherent to many factors, some of which can be mastered, planned or controlled. Others are unfortunately imponderables that literally escape any projection or prevention within human capacities. Disruptive elements without being limiting, they can slow down and not prevent the march towards progress. At the heart of these different factors necessary for any evolution, there is above all the human and the technology which are essential to its impetus. From the highest antiquity to the present day, development - this is understood in the sense of an organized social transformation favorable to the emancipation of a human community - offers different scenarios for the study of human societies in the spacetime frame.
Just as any human community can experience its peak, so it can experience its collapse to start afresh. And, Aimé Césaire is quite right to defend this idea that Africa did not need to meet Europe on its way before claiming any development or any modernity. As many minds often ignorant of the History of Africa in the West think and assert as a response to the slavery and colonial past of the West. Without suspecting that basically, on closer inspection, the West owes all the essential foundations of its own Civilization to Ancient Black Africa. Ancient Egypt - it must be said - is there to eloquently illustrate the degree of progress and modernism to which ancient Africa has attained in the past. Long before ancient Egypt, Ancient Nubia reached a degree of progress in its time to the point of spreading its elements of Civilization throughout the world and in particular in the oldest India. Many millennia before the West came to take back some of these same elements of Civilization that Ancient Egypt inherited from Ancient Nubia to forge what would later be called Western Civilization. Is there still a need to invite contradiction to all those who think the opposite... Indeed, we will seek for a long time, in what the West colonizing Africa and many other countries and regions of the world and consequently become condescending and arrogant, what he calls his Indo-European roots without going through Ancient Black Africa and more precisely the Nile Valley. Who says otherwise?
Following this unfortunate accident which caused the Ancestors of Westerners to meet the Ancestors of Africans in these times of conquest and barbarism characteristic of the periods of Slavery and Colonization, the Western rulers of today do not have definitely not always understood much about Africa. Because the resilience of Africa is neither a submission nor an invitation to the repetition of history. And even if times have indeed changed and we cannot accuse or hold responsible the Westerners of today for the wrongs that their Ancestors caused to the Ancestors of Africans today, there remains an undeniable fact: it is that the West, from yesterday to today, will have benefited for its economic development and its technological progress from the looting committed in Africa. Therefore, the least that this continent has a right to expect from the West is a little respect and a lot of solidarity rather than the paternalism that most Western leaders often show towards of their counterparts in Africa. A solidarity that must not confine either to begging and the temptation of laziness on the part of Africans or to customs clearance and the temptation of expiation for Westerners.
What Western leaders have really not yet understood about Africa is that countries can be poor but dignified, refusing to be told how Africans should behave by the West and its big powers even when Africans never say a word in the affairs of Westerners. What today's Western leaders have definitely not yet understood about Africa is that this arrogance and this paternalism in wanting to set themselves up as givers of lessons and as makers of universal laws taxable to Africa contribute to straining its relations with Africa. This does not prevent Africans from recognizing that there are values in human existence that are universal. Like the eminently sacred nature of life or individual and collective freedoms. The Charter of Manden or Charter of Kouroukan Fouga and well before this famous charter now Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO since 2009, the concept of "ANKH" of Ancient Egypt, proclaims in truth in its first meaning the sanctity of all life and all its corollary of inalienable rights.
Even after this painful past of Slavery and Colonization, the West has unfortunately continued to look down on Africa. Alas!... All these accumulated errors regarding the views that Western leaders continue to have on African countries through the prism of the past, are gradually distancing Africa from the West from a geopolitical point of view today. Nevertheless ! And yet... Europe and Africa are so close not only by Geography but also by History, in particular this common past which is certainly very painful but which we can never hide or erase, that they should in principle better to get closer than to get away. Conversely, this pretentious and thoughtless attitude of the West and this collusion with the leaders who do not benefit the populations in any way has long paved the way for emerging powers such as China and Russia. Which are far from being equally free from criticism. Quite the contrary! They only have a completely different approach and a way of acting in their relations with Africans, in this case Heads of State or Government, which commands them to carefully avoid interfering in political matters without to be invited and to carefully avoid social issues on which Africans are the only ones to decide. Because each human society creates its own "shit" in the full sense of the term, it is up to each human society to recycle its own "shit". And in no way to any foreign partner, be he neighbor or friend and whoever he is or wherever he comes from, to tell Africans how they should walk or how they should dress, etc. As if they were eternal children who cannot manage on their own and who have to be taught everything and worse by standing behind them, like Wardens of a definitively bygone era. But here it is: the Heads of State or Government of Africa, including Dictators, Kleptocrats and other economic predators, do not often have to wait for Western leaders to make explicit or implicit allusions to the aspirations of their peoples to Democracy and good governance to stand up, as if suddenly stung, as ardent defenders of the independence or sovereignty of African countries. To the point of wanting to make Africans believe that Democracy is a Western invention that has nothing to do with African culture, which is absolutely false of course. Indeed, such quibbles are often brandished in desperation and for political purposes only to better prepare a certain African public opinion for submission to authoritarian excesses and to oppose everything that is stamped West. And even if it is good for Africa. Allegedly in the name of the independence or sovereignty of African countries.
By Marcus Boni Teiga
