African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and
interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the
self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one
thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest.
The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch
and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should
show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in
the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life
for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no
king, Igbo ama eze.
This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.
The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was
the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are
the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be
combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families
emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s
property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our
people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.
Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the
arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as
White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the
colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to
make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result,
many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.
Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed
concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as
the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because
Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their
fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.
The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by
Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they
were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the
system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and
presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the
white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the
country belongs to all who live in it.
The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by
Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human
as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu,
everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone
deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is
unforgivable.
Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo
celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together
to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the
community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection
from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination.
Martin Luther
King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that
people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the
extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.
Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the
colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about
who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed
homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in
addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did
not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military
perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits
in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death
penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the
Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to
the tolerant culture of our ancestors.
No African society banned homosexuality before the
colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities
of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved
one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t
Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a
law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men
liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or
Gelede masquerades, for instance.
Today, dressing like a woman in parts of
Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex
couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the
Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that
the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school
girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of
children out of school and with low human development index.
Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had
the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them
until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize
exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9
million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the
suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa
in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and
Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the
ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound
incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere.
In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails
into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who
prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.
In Renascent Africa,
Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and
adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration
of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill
their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times.
The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African
Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the
African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt
police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with
Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific
method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for
Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.
One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide
and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in
Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in
the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the
killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in
Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of
the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism.
The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.
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