By Nakhokho Rashid Matselele,
OPINION
Almost seven decades have passed since African nations began reclaiming their sovereignty which ushered in the end of colonial rule across the continent. However, there are questions that still linger in the minds of many young and old Africans. Why does our continent still struggle to feed its people, govern itself, and think for itself after more than sixty years of political independence? We have the land, the people, the minerals, and the good climate, what are we missing?
Well, the greatest problem of Africa today is not corruption, not tribalism, and not even poverty. These are just symptoms of the real disease, which is ideological bankruptcy. I mean the complete absence of a homegrown philosophy to guide our politics, our economies, and our societies. For the last seventy years, we have been a continent that borrows ideas the way some people borrow clothes, wearing them without knowing if they truly fit. This idea has been expressed by many writers, scholars, researchers, and intellectuals who study African history and culture.
The Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney (1972) argued in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that colonialism did not only steal our resources, it systematically destroyed our capacity to think as Africans. European powers dismantled existing African systems of governance, trade, and philosophy, then replaced them with their own, and taught us that this replacement was progress.
Frantz Fanon described this process with painfully in The Wretched of the Earth (1961)that; “Colonialism, does not only occupy a territory, it occupies the mind. It teaches the colonized to despise themselves, to see their own culture as primitive, and to look to the colonizer for all wisdom.” This is what happened to us. We were told to dislike our black identity. We were told to be ashamed of our cultural beliefs, our languages, and our ways of organizing society.
Of course Some of those cultural practices were indeed wrong and needed to change, However, along with the practices that needed reform, we also lost the good that our systems of communal governance, our ideologies of shared responsibility, our traditions of dialogue and consensus.
Up to date take a walk into any university in Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, or Nigeria. The textbooks on the shelves are still mostly those that were written in London, Paris, or Washington. The theories of economics our students still learn are from Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. The political science we study draws from Aristotle and John Locke. I do not mean that this is entirely wrong because knowledge belongs to all humanity. But the problem is that there is almost no equal and opposite effort to also teach African thought, African economics, and African political philosophy alongside these Western frameworks.
The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo, in one of his book Decolonizing the Mind (1986), argued that language is the most powerful weapon of cultural imperialism. When African children are taught to think, read, and dream in European languages while their mother tongues are treated as inferior, they are being trained to measure all value by a foreign standard. The result, as Ngugi observed, is a generation that can recite Shakespeare but cannot explain the wisdom of their own grandparents.
Look at our political systems. Most of the constitutions written at independence were essentially drafted in the offices of departing colonial powers. The Westminster parliamentary model was handed to Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria like a school uniform on the last day of term. The French gave their former colonies a Napoleonic administrative tradition that was designed for France, not for West Africa. And because these borrowed systems did not emerge from our own history and social realities, they have constantly broken down and required repeated repairs that usually come in the form of yet more foreign advice.
When we turn to our economic story ,it is very troubling. When African nations face a financial crisis, the instinct is to fly to Washington and knock on the door of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF then prescribes its standard medicine of cutting public spending, liberalizing the economy, privatizing state assets. These prescriptions may have logic in other contexts, but they are rarely designed in line with the needs of small scale farmers in Uganda or Rwanda. We end up implementing solutions written for problems in other countries, then wonder why the patient does not recover.
When a country cannot pay for its own schools and hospitals without permission from foreign donors, it cannot truly call its policies its own. Donors do not always force their decisions in an obvious way. However, there is usually a quiet pressure, shown through the conditions they attach to the aid, in the priorities that get funded, and in the ideas that get respected at the planning table.
It is important to say that Africa has not been without ideas. The problem is that we abandoned our own intellectual traditions and allowed them to be buried under colonial ridicule. Leaders like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania attempted to build a genuinely African philosophy of governance through Ujamaa, a concept rooted in the African tradition of family hood and communal living. Nyerere insisted that African socialism must grow from African roots, not be imported from Marx and Engels. His experiment may have met failures, but the idea itself was correct, that Africa must build its own frameworks.
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana spoke of Pan-Africanism which meant a philosophy that would blend traditional values of Africa, Islamic influences, and the experiences of the diaspora into one powerful identity. Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso demonstrated in the 1980s that an African government could achieve food self-sufficiency, mass literacy, and gender equality without depending on Western aid. These were imperfect men leading imperfect projects. But they were at least asking the right question, that is, what does Africa need on its own terms?
None of this means that Africa must reject all ideas from the outside world. That would be foolish and impossible. Ideas, like trade, cross borders. But there is a difference between choosing useful foreign ideas from a position of intellectual confidence, and swallowing every foreign idea because you do not trust your own thinking.
What Africa urgently needs is a new generation of leaders in politics, business, academia, and culture, who are genuinely, grounded in African realities, who have studied African history with the same seriousness they have studied Western history, who can look at an African problem and reach for an African solution first rather than last.
This means reforming our education systems so that African philosophy, African history, and African economics are taught as seriously as their Western counterparts. It means funding African research institutions and African think tanks. It means creating political cultures that reward original thinking rather than punishing it. And it means that ordinary Africans should stop treating a Western stamp of approval as the highest measure of truth.
The chains that the old colonizers placed on Africa were made of iron. They were visible, and they could be broken by political struggle. However, the chains that hold Africa today are made of ideas, which are harder to see and harder to break. But they must be broken all the same.
Real liberation will not come when Africa gets more foreign aid or more foreign investment. It will come when we raise a generation of Africans who trust their own minds enough to build/something that has never existed before.
The writer is a Ugandan Journalist, Communication and Media Specialist Exploring Culture, Politics, Religion and Media
