The Challenge for Africa

by Wangari Maathai

  The Ashanti dominated West Africa from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The kingdom of Benin spread south and west to the Niger Delta during the fifteenth century, while Dahomey (in modern-day Ghana and Benin) flourished from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The Zulu nation resisted the British and Boer expansion into southern Africa; Zanzibar traded spices with India and the Arab world; and the city of Great Zimbabwe was a center of commerce that archaeological evidence suggests may have done business with Arabia—and, if the discovery of pottery shards from Nanjing is any indication, possibly with China as well.

  To be sure, some of these states, like those of their eventual European conquerors, were imperialist, collected tributes, and engaged in slavery, across both the Atlantic Ocean and the Arabian Sea. However, contrary to the image of Africans perpetually at war with each other, there is no evidence that these civilizations were any more aggressive or perpetrated more atrocities than the colonialists who subdued them. Indeed, until the expansion of the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when as many as twenty-five million people were removed from Africa's shores (and new diseases wiped out both people and livestock), Africans had seen their wealth increase along with advances in technology, learning, and the arts. Some communities possessed huge herds of cattle and had mastered the ability to refine precious metals and mineral deposits.5

  Given that advanced indigenous African civilizations were a reality, why were most African societies so vulnerable to European powers? One obvious factor was that African leadership and the slave traders developed an insatiable greed as the demand for slaves increased across the Atlantic. Another was the products of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of Western medicine that followed the debilitating effects of slavery. Ordinary Africans were awestruck at the power, knowledge, and skills displayed by the colonial administrators and missionaries; dazzled by the healing power of their medicines; and stunned by the speed of their transportation when horses, rickshaws, and, later, trains (“fire-spitting snakes”) and cars arrived. All of these new technologies overwhelmed the native peoples, whose technology was demonstrably less developed.

  Most impressive of all, however, was the power of the gun, which was presented to the African populations as the white man's magic and witchcraft—and a very strong witchcraft at that. For the colonial powers, everything depended on intimidating the natives through the display and use of force, because if the local peoples had been less impressed, they would have been harder to subdue and exploit.

  Nonetheless, in spite of the often terrible and disproportionate retribution for opposing the colonial powers, many African nations resisted the foreign intrusion and acquisition of their lands and property wherever they could. The Ashanti waged four wars with the British during the nineteenth century; Samory Touré fought French expansion in western Africa and the Sudan for decades, while the Zulus famously battled the British in 1879; and the Hehes of German East Africa (who live in what is now modern-day Tanzania) fought the colonial administration in the early years of the twentieth century. Some African communities played imperialist forces off each other in a desperate attempt to ensure their survival as the Great Powers fought for control of the continent's human beings, rubber, gold, ivory, diamonds, cacao, timber, and fertile lands. Nevertheless, the gun proved far superior to magic, or the spear, shield, and bow and arrow. Tens of thousands of native Africans were killed mercilessly so the newcomers could access their wealth or settle on their lands. Eventually, the military power of the intruders overwhelmed Africa, and the Europeans carved its territory into spheres of control. Overwhelmed, many Africans were hauled onto reservations.

  Perhaps nothing from the West, however, had greater power over conquered natives worldwide than the legal and economic systems the imperial powers imposed, along with exposure to the Bible. Before the missionaries came to sub-Saharan Africa in the mid- to late nineteenth century, contact beyond the coasts had mainly involved trade in slaves and ivory; Islam, which had been in Africa almost since its beginning in the seventh century CE, generally remained confined to the regions north of the Sahel and on the coast; and neither Arabs nor Europeans made much effort to introduce their cultures to the natives in the hinterlands.

  Culture in Africa had remained mostly oral, with the tenets, triumphs, and troubles of its peoples transmitted from generation to generation through word of mouth or tradition. When written culture finally arrived in sub-Saharan Africa, especially with the missionaries, Africans were mesmerized by the records that were proclaimed to be the words of God.

  While the native peoples knew and worshipped God, they didn't know that anything had been written about him. The Bible was presented to the inhabitants as more relevant to their lives than the oral knowledge, traditions, and wisdom of the culture that had sustained them up to that point. They were told that Christianity not only represented a better expression of devotion than their own cultural practices, but indeed was the true faith; to question its authority or that of those who interpreted it was a sin and indeed heretical. To local peoples all around the world, including Africa, the Bible became the entry point to a new way of life that was guided by a new priesthood, whose power and authority were reinforced by the conquerors' guns. If some parts of the Bible contradicted the traditional wisdom of the local community's ancestors or were incomprehensible, what was needed, the natives were told, was not any effort to explain God's mysteries, but faith, and faith alone.

  Missionaries certainly provided an opportunity for communities to become literate—though only the Bible was available to read. Rather than take the foreign scriptures as works of human beings inspired by the Divine, however, the native peoples took them to be the literal words of God, whether dictated or even written by God himself. Neither the missionaries nor teachers saw the need to correct such misinformation; often they believed it themselves.

  However well-meaning the missionaries may have been in spreading what they perceived to be the Good News of Jesus Christ, the result of their evangelism was the beginning of a deep cultural inferiority complex among their African converts. Many assumed that God favored them less; that God had decided not to reveal himself to them directly but only to others—the Europeans—who were now offering them God's messages. If the favored communities, such as the colonialists and missionaries, had been chosen to receive the holy inspiration from God and offer it to other peoples, it was self-evident that their way of life, culture, and mores were superior, and that native life and culture would have to change. Moreover, went Africans' reasoning, not only would they be welcomed into a superior culture should they accept the teachings of the Book, but they also would be blessed in the eyes of God.

  Africans' acceptance of their own “inferiority” partly ex plains why, in spite of the political and armed resistance they marshaled, so many cultures fell to the gunboats and missionaries in the latter half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Within a few decades, everything foreign—that which the colonial administrators and missionaries brought forth—became synonymous in the local peoples' minds with what was more advanced, closer to God's wishes, and in all ways preferable to their previous way of life and values. The existence they had led before the arrival of the colonial powers and missionaries became not only unworthy, but sinful. Some peoples were even encouraged to consider themselves the children of Ham, who saw his father, Noah, naked and was cursed (see Genesis 9:22). Christianity would lift this curse Africans had lived under for centuries without their knowing it; they were baptized children of God and finally available for his mercy.

  It didn't occur to the local communities or even the bearers of this message that, in the same way the Israelites were the children of their God, so were they of theirs. The idea that God speaks and inspires all peoples and gives them what they need to lead them through life was lost to the missionaries. Where there had been priests, teachers, and wisemen and -women, who carried with them
the knowledge required to sustain the people and recollect their history in order to teach future generations, all local populations became perpetual students of the new knowledge and wisdom. Inherent in the very nature of being a learner and not a teacher is an inability to be master of one's own world. One is forever being led, forever having to look for guidance from someone else, forever vulnerable to a master's misinformation or exploitation.

  As Christianity became embedded in Africa, so did the idea that it was the afterlife that was the proper focus of a devotee, rather than this one—a legacy that continues to affect development. Putting so much emphasis on the delights of heaven and making it the ultimate destination devalues life in the present. It is as if all happiness and satisfaction, as well as relief from material wants and needs, will be found in heaven, not on Earth.

  In my view, such an attitude allows institutions (such as the church) and powerful people (a member of parliament or other politician) to encourage people to remain passive. The people come to believe, in effect, that they will ultimately be saved by an outside force rather than by the sum of their actions. They may know they have a problem, for instance, with soil being swept into rivers when the seasonal rains come, or their sand dams being blocked. They may understand that they can change their situation, since neither planting trees nor scooping excess soil from the river requires heavy machinery or advanced technical skills. Yet they sit and wait for their MP, the church, an aid agency, or a foreign government to solve the problem. They devalue their own capacity and responsibility to act. This legacy of colonialism persists and remains devastating.

  A further cause of vulnerability is the fact that those communities whose cultures and religions are oral rather than written and institutionalized are always likely to be more susceptible to the destabilizing forces of colonialism, unrest, or war. Across Africa, over the course of several decades, the cultures of many communities were pushed into irrelevance. The wisdom-keepers were dismissed as sorcerers and witches, and what they knew about their communities—the ceremonies, symbols, stories, dances, folklore—died with them. The indigenous priesthood was replaced by a Christian one, which was defined as innately superior. The ways communities had learned about the land they lived on, the peoples who surrounded them, the God they worshipped, and their own reasons for being were lost as missionary schools replaced traditional systems of learning.

  The Bible and the gun were not the only ways to impress the natives. There were the cotton clothes that replaced the wearing of animal skins. There was soap and salt and sugar. The use of stone and cement was a very new technology that allowed the building of large rectangular houses with many rooms, as opposed to traditional circular homes built with mud and thatch. There were also household goods that replaced calabashes, earthen pots, straw trays, and a whole range of artifacts. Instead, there came the glamour of official clothing, accoutrements, and mannerisms. All these were forceful symbols of the intruders' self-image and power and were embraced as tokens of modernity, gentility, and success.

  This impressive materialism and social advantage stood to be acquired by the locals if they allowed the newcomers to settle on their lands and teach them the new ways of life. To inherit all these, the communities needed to accept the world of the missionaries and denounce their own culture. Furthermore, the colonialists and the missionaries didn't always have to push their ideas down the throats of the colonized population; once subdued, the public on their own accepted opportunities to become followers and collaborators. Some of the missionaries were welcomed into communities and naturalized by the elders, and lived among them as one of their own.

  For most Africans, the imposition of colonialism—whether through conquest, immigration, or the demands of an unfair trading system—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries happened too fast for them to be able to adopt the new way of life and at the same time control the loss of their cultures and civilizations. For some communities in Africa, though, the colonial experience was limited or short-lived, such as in Ethiopia and Botswana. Others were marginalized or ignored. For example, the pastoralist Maasai were stubborn in their unwillingness to cooperate with the colonial authorities, which were mainly interested in acquiring land for commercial farming. In Kenya, the Maasai were moved from much of their land and restricted to reservations that other Africans needed special permission to enter. As their interaction with the colonial authorities and missionaries was limited, the Maasai were able to keep their culture more intact. Ironically, it is the Maasai who are proud symbols of Kenya to tourists, precisely because they didn't surrender their culture and accept the vision presented to them through the cracked mirror.

  Perhaps the ultimate irony of the arrival of the Bible and the gun in Africa rests in the fact that it's almost exclusively because of the writings of the missionaries, the colonialists, and the Western social historians—those who largely dismissed the traditions of Africans as primitive tribal customs—that we know anything about many of the cultural practices of precolonial African peoples. When Africans desire to rediscover and reclaim their own culture, they're often obliged to travel to European and American libraries and archives for the information. It isn't unusual to find that foreigners know more about the native peoples than the latter know about themselves. Such is often the fate of the colonized.

  Africans have been shaped by many experiences: invasion, the slave trade, liberation, discrimination, and apartheid; the arrival of literacy, Christianity, and Islam; and deculturalization and displacement. Some were beneficial and revolutionized the African way of life; others were destructive.

  All these experiences have touched and shaped the African psyche. Perhaps because of the intensity, frequency, and persistence of these challenges, it has been more difficult for the African spirit to overcome them than it has been for other peoples who experienced similar upheavals. The African leadership often failed to help its people deal with the impact of these experiences and instead tended to deny that they ever happened. Because Africa has not had a culture of writing, it has been easy to promote a culture of forgetting.

  For instance, few Africans fully understand the history of the Atlantic slave trade, because for many generations this period was kept out of oral or written history and is largely unspoken of in Africa, even though Africans were the victims. If history is not passed orally from generation to generation, and it is not written in history books so that it is deliberately taught to the next generation, it quickly disappears from memory. Those who wrote the history of Africa that is taught in schools were often the perpetrators of the wrongs that were done and wrote from their perspective. Quite obviously, they preferred to “forget and move forward.”

  It is often outside Africa that Africans begin to discover the untold story of slavery and other terrible deeds done to and by them on the continent. Many Africans are shocked when they discover the truth about their ancestors during the slave trade and colonial expansion. Now, finally, a more balanced history is being written by researchers who can access classified information, which may have been state secrets until recently.

  THE NEW NATION-STATES

  As hurriedly and haphazardly as the European powers drew lines across the map of Africa in 1885, so in the 1950s and '60s did they retreat from their colonies. They coalesced groups of people to form nation-states, and many groups found themselves herded together into these new entities and identities. In eastern Africa, for instance, the Maasai were placed in Kenya and Tanzania; the Teso in Kenya and Uganda; the Somalis in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia; and the Luos in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The new nation-states were given a name, a flag, and a national anthem, and then handed over to a select group of Western-educated elites, most of whom were sympathetic to the colonial administration, whether they had been groomed for leadership by them or imprisoned or exiled instead.

  The process of deculturization continued after independence, as the division between the new African elites and the peoples they gove
rned continued to widen. The peoples of Africa were very disadvantaged—economically, in terms of education, and with their cultures destroyed. As a result, they were not in a position to hold their leaders accountable, and unfortunately their leaders took advantage of that fact. In addition, many of the new African states retained many elements of colonial governance, which leaders used to the same ends as the colonialists. They exploited their peoples in the name of progress, employment, and a better quality of life, and accumulated wealth for themselves, their families, and their friends, often corruptly and at the expense of the majority of their citizens. They adopted the attitude of the former European masters and did whatever they deemed necessary to maintain power. They took advantage of their peoples and then shed crocodile tears over their continued poverty, conflicts, and all the other ills associated with the continent.

  Such wholesale robbery and destruction could have been achieved only through continuing to cultivate the culture of disempowerment, learned from the colonizers, that kept the great mass of people ignorant, fearful, passive, and obedient. The people's ignorance was promoted through the direct control of the flow of information. The national radio and television networks were monopolized and controlled. Public meetings and gatherings were disallowed so that citizens heard and did only what the state machinery let them hear and do.

  The provincial administration, an agent of oppression and one of the worst holdovers of colonial times, addressed the local people in languages that they did not fully comprehend; the people, either out of politeness or out of fear for their own safety, pretended they understood their new masters and applauded enthusiastically at the end of public speeches. Meanwhile, the leaders promised the show of good government. The citizens clapped with much enthusiasm at the empty assurances, and thanked the leaders for goods and services they never received. For the many peoples of Africa, the dreams of the postcolonial era were shattered.