Who is responsible for our misery?

Submitted by Sizwe Nyenyiso

There is no doubt in my mind that someone should take responsibility for all the misery experienced by Africans. Ancient history reveals that Africa was a harmonised and peaceful continent in the world, whose inhabitants hunted with bows and even wooden clubs.

Many Africans sustained their living primarily through hunting and agricultural activities. Property was collectively owned, work was done communally and goods were shared out equally. It was during this stage that African values, particularly “ubuntu”, were upheld.

The colonising “Europeans” invaded our land, forcefully looting and manipulating our natural resources and enslaving our people. This was the beginning of misery for Africans. They came with strange value systems and forcefully replaced ours. They indoctrinated us to believe that African values were flawed and would ever be inferior to those of Europe. They made us believe that our inherent connection to our ancestors was evil and against God’s will.

In the words of Frantz Fanon: “In colonies, the European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked up promising adolescents; they branded them, as with red iron, with the principles of Western culture; they stuffed their mouth full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, white-washed.”

African countries were developing independently until they were taken over by the capitalist powers. This was the birth of inhumanity, inequalities, self-enrichment, poverty and hardships; it was a period when our forefathers were murdered in their own land.

It was at this stage when we were taught that killing was not inhuman; rather was the way of ensuring compliance and solving problems. The “divide and rule” strategy was successfully used to split Africans into different groups. Violence was the mechanism to instigate fear and dependence. They came to our beautiful land and demarcated it as they wished without any approval by the peasants. The only crime that Africans committed was to be blessed by a beautiful continent, wealthy with natural resources.

We cannot run from the fact that colonisers, imperialists and apartheid masters played a significant role in the underdevelopment of black people. They looted our resources and successfully privatised them for their individual gains, to the benefit of the white minority in our African societies.

The inheritance and further centralisation of these benefits created huge differences in the well-being of Africa’s inhabitants, which is witnessed in the social well-being of our people.

African countries are divided into an extremely rich white minority and an extremely poor black majority, and South Africa is no exception. Black Africans inherited poverty while whites inherited the wealth of our land.

It is by no accident that in South Africa, the majority of companies listed on the JSE have white CEOs. This is a reflection of the society in which we are living. Being extremely vulnerable to all sorts of underdevelopment, the poor revolt in any form (violent or non-violent) to make their condition noticed by the bureaucrats.

Africans behave the way they do today, as witnessed by the hate violence against African nationals in South Africa, largely because of the teachings by colonial and apartheid masters. Africans were made to believe that the only way to wage victory in any struggle was through violence.

It is therefore safe to say that what one sees in South Africa today, hate violence among Africans, is a result of indoctrination by the colonial and apartheid masters. Some South Africans behave the way they do because they were falsely made to believe that their values were less important in society.

We can give it fancy names, but conflicts in Africa are centred on the ownership of resources. Africans believe that access to natural resources is the only way to address their underdevelopment. Africans know very well that African oppression was fuelled by European greed with the aim to loot their resources.

In African countries, citizens are living far below the poverty line and the per capita is far less than that of developed countries. However, there are a few members of a black elite who are benefiting from the means of production in the recent regimes. They have completely forgotten their roots. They join the white capitalist class in upmarket suburbs, drive flashy cars and drink expensive whisky, at the expense of the majority of our people. They completely compromise their values of ubuntu and replace them with European values of self-enrichment.

It is therefore important for our governments to expedite the redress of natural resources and economic ownership. The sharing of our economic benefits needs to be tailored to recognise our values and should be distributed equally among all citizens, black or white and rural or urban.

It is significant that many of the challenges faced by Africans today are the consequences of colonial and apartheid systems. In building true rainbow nations, white Africans should acknowledge that black Africans were robbed of their wealth by their ancestors.

The honourable way they can ease their conscience is to share their inheritance among all Africans and be sensitive to the policies of equity and redress. If they fail to do that, they too will be responsible for the underdevelopment of Africa’s black people.

Sizwe Nyenyiso describes himself as an ordinary South African