Revealing the true characters of Africans
By Steve Paterno*
April 11, 2006 — It is embarrassing to admit the obvious fact that the Arabs and Europeans are way smarter than the Africans as they are the ones who understand the Africans more than the Africans understand themselves. It is convenient to say that all men are created equal, but how true is that saying? Equal as in what? Human, what is that anyways, how can human be measured so as it be considered “created equal”!
Take for example the most so-called educated Africans. Some of these people are really half educated if the standard of measuring education is based on knowledge. These people prove to be having a little understanding of their own societies when they start to talk of the things that affect them the most. These people will use their half educational knowledge, which is limited in scope and history to justify everything that happen among their societies and blame non-Africans for those things. Their knowledge of history is so short that it started with colonialization to the present. It is like those history classes they provide to college students, which they categorized by period of time per course for credits. The Africans knowledge of their own societies is like a knowledge of someone who watch a movie that is interrupted by commercial and is almost finishing. Therefore, in their limited knowledge of the existence of their societies, for Africans, everything has to be put in the prospective of colonialization, in order to qualify one as educated. And their future vision is as short as seconds ahead. That is why Africans never produce scientists but instead produce fortunetellers who can only claim to envision bad things though their evil visions are questionable at all time.
In Sudan for example, the evil of colonialism is topping the lists of the most cited reasons for the ills that affect that destitute country today. Some of those so-called educated and intellectuals from that country have proclaimed that they have finally discovered the major problems, which are affecting the Sudan. That is so because they went to schools that offer them degrees by teaching them to understand the knowledge that stretch as near as only few centuries past. In other words, they are taught the history that did not teach them about their societies before colonial era. That knowledge, which constitutes limited time in history, has become the only knowledge of the existence of their societies they know thus far.
It goes like this: long time ago, some people come from far land known as the Arab land to trade with the Africans. These Arab people introduced unfair trading practices that exploited African resources, which included human being in form of slavery and the Arabs institute a rule over the Africans. In the later years, those Arabs were joined by other group of people from Europe who even used a more sophisticated techniques to exploit the Africans. “They divide and rule” is the name of the technique attributed to the Europeans to deprieve Africans.
Equipped with that knowledge from schools, the so-called educated Africans or in this particular case, the African Sudanese believe they identify the problems, and unfortunately the solutions they tried to find for those problems are confusing to say the least. They include from waging war of independence to fighting liberation and revolutionary wars even among themselves the so-called African Sudanese. They die in millions and their miseries seem to be getting good part of them as a result. They also adopt some confusing political slogans such as self-determination, New Sudan, and Marginalized people of the Sudan as philosophical means of finding solutions among their ill societies.
Sadly, nothing is resolved as of yet despite all their desperate attempt for finding solutions. The Arabs are still trading (a euphemism for exploiting), enslaving and ruling the Africans in places like the Sudan. The Europeans; well, they have even gotten more smarter in developing a technique beyond the word sophistication can described. As oppose to “divide and rule” the technique is enhanced to the extent that they do not rule the Africans anymore but tamed them as in the same manner they domesticated animals during the Gladiators’ age. By domesticating the Africans to become overly dependence to the Europeans the way it is now, the only thing that is left for the Africans to obtain on their own is the water. Like, their animals, the Africans have to struggle to get the water. Even so, the death rate of ninety percent of those with lack of access to water occurs in Africa. The U.N., an European organization, is already predicting Africans to rely on water supply from somewhere in two decades or so to come. One prominent figure is quoted in a bible saying, “all the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Well, African rivers are not capable of such mysterious performance anymore.
And speaking of African society, the African Sudanese in particular, only the Arabs and Europeans will be the ones that will understand what is wrong with them. In a place called Western Equatoria, cattle are grazed in farmlands intended for crops for human consumption. In some places, villages made up of bush houses are torched to ground, which will let one to only wonder on why they still build houses with bushes as oppose to concrete if those houses are going to be torched. In places such as Upper Nile and Bher el Ghazel, those are where the misery of human being surpasses its superlative form, meaning the Europeans have to invent a new terminology to describe that human misery. In a place known as Eastern Equatoria, the best and most popular sport is cattle rustling or cattle raiding. In the Greater Equatoria, a mysterious mutilation, killing, raping, looting, and kidnapping is taking place. And those are attributed to a one fellow claiming to be carrying the instructions of God, the God that the European brought to Africa. Darfur is the place where one will go and after seeing a horrific destruction of humanity with one own eyes, then one will have to go evaluation where one will be asked, “have you seen? Where is the evidence of the destruction?” Given the compelling magnitude of the destruction of humanity over there, one will have no evidence of it, because the evidence is beyond the evidence, therefore, you will just let it pass, and that is just a glimpse of life not only in the Sudan but Africa.
The Africans believe that all these things that cause misry to their societies are the curse that the Arabs and the Europeans brought onto them, but had the Africans attain a little bit more education beyond the level they have now, they would have known what were their societies like before the arrival of Arabs and Europeans, which will probably help them in shifting the blame a little bit and be able to deal with their problems from the point of understanding their origins. For example, an educated African will dispute a notion that European discovered Lake Victory because the lake was there before the European came. Perhaps that is true, then could it also be true that all the things that affect Africans today are not the making of European but things that were there before the European came. Yeah, just like they found the lake there, they named it Lake Victoria in the same way when they found those things they named tribalism, corruption, slavery, genocide, ethnicity, etc. Could it be possible that those things were there but the Africans do not know that they are there, but it has to take an Arab or an Europe to tell that those things are there so that they are named. The Africans claim that they own gold and diamond, and they kill each other in mining fields, but yet ending up buying gold and diamond in Arab and European stores. Africans did not even know that there was Lake Victoria, it was until an European came strolling along the Nile and found that lake and told the Africans about it. Otherwise, they did not know it let alone if they even have a name for it. What was those people living along the River Nile thought the water came from?
Can the Africans embark in reeducation that has a prospective of African societies before the coming of Arabs and Europeans? Sad, it is probably going to take another Arab or European to tell the Africans what they were like before, since the Africans have no recollection whatever of those periods. Anyway, what were the African societies like before the colonial era?
…and they told me that my name is Steve Paterno or it could have been Shihab Fateen.
* Steve Paterno is a Sudanese residing in the U.S.A., and he can be reached at [email protected]