One of the things that distinguishes human society from that of animals is the ability of humans to forge tools and use them in their quest to eliminate limitations and increase their freedom. People develop or convert other entities into tools and rely on them to easily achieve their goals, improve their lives and, finally, bring their environment together, create more happiness and relaxing time. It is important to note that the tools mentioned are not divinely ordained, but rather designed and made by humans, as they address various challenges that cannot be met individually or without proper tools.
Tools are the basis of human civilization, as they allow us to control our lives and our environment regardless of the season, while animals will have no choice but to flee drought to the next green pasture, for the lack of tools. For example, years ago, our ancestors spent a lot of time and energy traveling to see each other, socialize and exchange, but today, we can socialize without necessarily having to leave our comfort zone thanks to the modern tools of socialization and commerce such as social media and others. Essentially, tools play a crucial role in the lives of humans, individually and collectively, as a society. So, it can be said that no human’s needs can be satisfied in the modern world without proper tools to meet those needs. The same goes for Africa with all its needs today, it is only with appropriate tools that Africans will be able to realize their first collective desire for freedom and emancipation. It is very simple: no amount of prayer, magic or wishful thinking can liberate Africa, unless it is accompanied by relevant tools deliberately designed by Africans for their own liberation and emancipation. The question is therefore what tools are being developed today by Africans in their quest for liberation in all areas of human activity? Let’s examine it.
Primarily, in every person’s life, there are seasons and circumstances that define and redefine that person’s true goals and efforts as they go through those circumstances. For example, if you enrol in a four-year university program, this four-year period becomes a season of study for you and your efforts are entirely devoted to obtaining your certificate and qualification. However, if during your four-year season you become ill, that illness automatically redefines your focus and effort, because you must now work, not to succeed in school, but to regain health, without which you might not be able to complete your studies. Almost all human beings have experienced this phenomenon in one way or another. However, people do not live in solitary, they live in a society defined by collective goals and efforts, and just as is the case with our individual lives, our community and society also go through the same patterns that require that we, as members of society, have collective goals and work together to achieve them. Whatever our individual goals, as members of a society we must also be aware of the collective goals that hold a society together, without which the concept of society loses its meaning.
Likewise, if the society’s initial goal was, for example, economic development and in the process a war breaks out with another society, then the initial goal, strategy, and efforts will need to be changed to adapt to current needs of security and survival of society. For example, if the goal of Africans today is Agenda 2063, but we are faced with neocolonialism, imperialism and any other ism that undermines our chances of achieving Agenda 2063, then our new goal today is to free ourselves from all isms, and our collective effort must go in this direction. However, as we have said from the beginning, we must forge useful tools to help us achieve this collective goal of freeing ourselves from all isms and achieving emancipation – the tools of liberation. For example, if you want to become a doctor, education is the only tool you have to achieve your dream. Does Africa need to be liberated? The answer is yes, so once again, what are our collective tools for the liberation of Africa in the 21st century?
Furthermore, when we talk about collective tools for the liberation of Africa, we might as well share the light on the fact that we have collective objectives born from the collective oppression inflicted on Africans by Western powers. No matter where you are on the continent or the community you choose to study, in the diaspora or at home; from West Africa to Central Africa, East Africa and South Africa, you will encounter a common pattern of deprivation, powerlessness and oppression. In other words, the entire African family is still subject to foreign domination and the survival of our colonial states is almost guaranteed by the goodwill of our oppressors. Under these conditions, nothing is more important for Africa than to regain its liberation and emancipation, from which development will take place as a natural process. But for Africans to truly secure their freedom, they must first equip themselves with the tools through which the current conditions of oppression will be reversed so that freedom can take place. Our inability to use everything at our disposal continues to make us a people who must rely on the sky and water for our liberation. Worse still, many of us deeply believe that by being good to the oppressors, they will one day change their attitude and thus liberate Africa. Whereas only an enslaved people are the only ones capable of determining and initiating their freedom with appropriate tools.
Today, the question arises again: what tools does Africa have today for freedom to materialize? The answer lies in the process undertaken by Europeans and the tools used to demean Africa.
Let’s start with the education of the oppressors in Africa. For them, education had only one main objective: to transform independent Africans into obedient servants of the cause of the European agenda. This intention was clearly expressed by a South African apartheid government official, Dr. HF. Verwood who was the architect of Bantu education. He (Verwood) argued that when I take control of black education, I will transform it so that blacks will learn from childhood that equality with Europeans is not for them. The same model of education offered to blacks by Europeans was observed throughout the continent and in the diaspora where Africans live, it was clear that Europeans made education an instrument/tool of African slavery. After independence, we may not have had enough power to change many things, but we certainly had the power to decide what education could be provided to our children as an equivalent tool to overthrow the established order of slavery and oppression in Africa.
The new education agenda should have had the mission of restoring confidence in African children and creating in them the capabilities of a free people, but this remains an open question. One of Africa’s greatest scholars, Professor Cheikh Anta Diop, declared that “African studies will only emerge from the vicious circle in which they find themselves, to regain all their meaning and all their fruitfulness, by heading towards the Nile valley”. We can say that education in Africa can be useful in two ways: the first is to make education a bridge, capable of connecting the modern African with his majestic achievements in the Nile Valley. And secondly, education must be transformed into a spear, an instrument with which the African child will combat all present and future obstacles, natural or man-made, on his path to the realization of his destiny. Unfortunately, education in Africa still serves today as a program of alienation for the African child: it allows black people to escape their culture (because it is considered backward), their languages, their communities and finally the predicament of their people. In other words, education in Africa is not yet used as a collective tool to change things and build a strong society, but rather an individual tool which allows one to escape from one’s people and their difficulties and to join the elite class. It is remarkable within our institutions of governance in Africa, those that we raise in these institutions are Negroes who have been intellectually transformed into a little British, a little French and a little Portuguese depending on who colonized them. At the same time, we seem to disdain the guardians of our culture and traditions. In some African countries, these traditional leaders and priests are not even allowed to have a political opinion, rather it is the so-called intellectuals from Harvard and Oxford who should rule the nation, this is ridiculous.
Furthermore, since we are talking about tools, we see the most devastating effect of current education in Africa in the sense that, instead of being used as a tool for African liberation, the opposite is happening, education is used to make Africans the tools of the system. This means that the African who leaves the current education system is well prepared to play his role as a cog in the great machine that we call capitalism. In principle, education in the hands of black people should serve as an instrument with which they can institutionalize Ubuntu and the pan-Africanist values necessary for African reconstruction. It can therefore be said that our predicament will persist until we are able to transform education into a tool in our hands to end imperialism and its oppression in our lives.
Further from education, religion is another powerful tool used by oppressors to conquer Africa and its people. In fact, most foreign religions in Africa speak of God’s love and salvation, but the true character of a God is only seen through those who present Him to others. Basically, the Bible in the hands of a white man is equal to the Koran in the hands of an Arab, and both are only war manuals. A good student of history will remember that there was a man called John Howking who was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I to come to Africa with a ship called Good Jesus. When the Good Jesus left Africa, it was filled with Africans bound back-to-back, destined for the captivity of Christian nations. Many died along the way and were offered to the sharks of the Atlantic Ocean, which still serves as the greatest burial ground for millions of our ancestors, and we have not been able to commemorate them.
The only goal of foreign religions in Africa was to dehumanize the image of the African, while projecting the image of the propagators of these religions in the image of God, so that when Africans serve these people, they have the feeling to serve God. This is why Europeans painted God and angels white like them, and baptized Africans were given European names, because they are divine. On the other hand, the Arabs did the same thing with the Africans who joined Islam, they were told to pray in the Arabic language and to abandon their African names in favour of Arabic names. A person who has fallen in love with the culture of his predators in the name of God is not expected to suddenly stand up and fight against these oppressors, because in his imagination the oppression is ordained by God and only God can judge. Anyway, who am I to question the anointed ones, even if they slaughter my people? amazing! So, fighting the oppressor who is in the image of God is like fighting God himself, and the black man does not want to go to war with God.
In every aspect of observation, Europeans used Christianity as an instrument of conquest to subjugate the minds of Africans and then exploit them, if possible, for eternity. The Arabs did the same thing and the effects of these two weapons are still anchored in the dynamics of Africa today. It is not for the love of God nor for the love of black people that foreign religions were introduced into Africa. in fact, given the selfishness of Western society, they could never have allowed black people to join Christianity to enter heaven if they truly believed there was equality, gold, honey and eternal joy in heaven for all blacks and whites. If a people cannot allow you to enjoy your innate right to freedom, they cannot allow you to use your own resources to develop your economy, they do not want you to have access to the nuclear weapons that guarantee security and power, how can they allow you to enter paradise where equality and eternal joy reign? The same can be said of Arabs who make people believe that there are seven virgin women in heaven waiting for all good Muslims, and yet they look down on black people who try to prey on their girls, but they are happy to share the seven virgins in heaven with everyone. When we go to Zanzibar, all the magnolias there have a story, they represent black people beheaded for having looked at Arab women by mistake. However, in paradise, there are only seven virgins for the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. Are these virgins black, white or Arab? Another open question. Until we learn to use religion in a different way, so that we can repair the psychological and economic damage caused by Westerners and Arabs, success will not be easy to achieve in Africa. In fact, with the decline of charismatic leaders in Africa, many Africans have placed their hopes in prophets, pastors and imams, that is, in churches and mosques. This means that churches and mosques still constitute a vital network of formal organization capable of bringing our people together. If used well, all churches and mosques in Africa can significantly reduce poverty and create jobs for young people. By doing so, we will have solved half of our problems. Otherwise, religions, even with a black face, remain the tools of foreign domination in Africa, since no revolution or major religious reform has taken place in Africa.
If we look at the economy, the patterns are the same. Currently, all countries in Africa have an ambitious economic agenda aimed at reducing poverty and putting the country on the path to development. The African Union is working on Agenda 2063 which also aims to create a $29 trillion economy in Africa, which is very good. However, we do not see the appropriate tools with which Africans will be able to achieve this economic goal of 29 trillion dollars. In reality, the African intelligentsia is counting on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to achieve Agenda 2063 or any other national economic agenda. While these institutions were created and used by the West as tools of plunder, which effectively helped deprive Africa of the benefits of its resources. For any lucid person, it is no secret that the oppressor cannot lend to the oppressed the tools with which he can free himself; only the oppressed can diligently choose the relevant tools in their struggle for liberation. If your oppressor chooses for you the tools with which you can fight him, then you can be sure of the ineffectiveness of these tools in your struggle.
Indeed, since the post-independence period in Africa, Western society has given instructions to Africans on what they should do to develop their economy, and the cost of these instructions was greater than the economic benefits generated by Africa. Modernization, industrialization, neoliberalism, sustainable development, integrated into the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the IFM, are among the tools that Europeans have lent to Africa to enable Africans to fight against imperialism. But what is interesting is that Africans themselves are beginning to project their economic future based on the same tools that slavers used to plunder Africa’s wealth. The closest we came to designing our own tools was in 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi championed the creation of an African Monetary Fund system, with a new currency. We know what happened. After the failure of this realistic approach, until now we have had symbolic gestures without substance or impact on the condition of the masses. Whether it is the African Continental Free Trade Agreement signed in 2018 or other regional economic agreements, we hardly see the relevant tools with which we will achieve these ambitious goals. Free trade cannot succeed in Africa if it is used with the colonial tools of visas and passports, colonial currencies and the banking system. Unless it targets only the elite and big capital, in which case the majority of Africans will be excluded from these so-called economic goals. But times are changing now; We are arriving at a time when people can no longer feed on the empty speeches and demonstrations of politicians and the mainstream media, only the appropriate tools for the economic liberation of Africa are essential. This means we have to return to the original plan from 2011.
In any case, what Africa has not understood in its relations with other peoples of the world is the importance of tools. There is nothing a civilization can accomplish in the modern world without first designing appropriate tools. This is the notion that other peoples of the world have understood perfectly, so much so that everything that falls into their hands is used as an instrument to satisfy their desires and wishes. Look at Europe for example, when the Europeans came to America, they were welcomed by the Indians, the Indians taught them the secrets of the land, and the Europeans took that knowledge and used it to exterminate the Indians. When the Europeans arrived in China, the Chinese showed them gunpowder, they taught the Europeans how to use it for fireworks, but the Europeans took it and turned it into a tool of extermination – the bullet, which they used to conquer the Chinese man. When they came to Africa, we welcomed them as guests and showed them our wealth. A minute later we had the Bible, and the Europeans had our wealth. One of the striking phenomena of European Christians is that they discovered that Africans were using statues for spiritual purposes, they took them away by force, considering them demonic, and now placed them in European museums where Africans visit against payment. In nutshell, we can spend an entire day describing how Europeans transformed even noble notions into the tools with which they conquered the world, but the important question arises for ourselves, as a conquered people. If we want to regain our freedom, what kinds of tools do we have and how do we use them to escape oppression? If religion, education, politics, music, sport, etc. are in our hands today, what have we done with them to ensure that they serve the African child as tools for their liberation? Because if we continue to use these things in the same way the oppressors used them, we may as well be participating in an agenda of our own destruction. I leave you with this powerful quote from Dr. John Henrik Clarke, we should take the time to meditate on it because it contains wisdom that can change our individual and collective lives. Dr. John Henrik Clarke said: “Everything that touches your life, religious, social and political, must be an instrument of your liberation or you must throw it into the ashtray of history”. If this becomes our guiding principle in life, then every minute of our life and every activity we do will be scrutinized for its importance in our liberation struggle, so that we do not waste time on unnecessary things.