African liberation starts with decolonising the mind
I believe Africa’s liberation from neo-colonial attitude starts with “Decolonising the Mind,” as Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it in his 1986 book of the same title.
I launched a petition June 1, calling on Africans to reclaim our natural wonders. How can there be a “Lake Victoria” in Uganda and a “Victoria Falls” in Zimbabwe in the 21st Century?
A parallel campaign, which is ongoing, must be recovery of Africa’s artefacts now displayed in the world’s leading museums. These priceless items could be housed in a future pan-African Museum in Addis Ababa, headquarters of the AU in Ethiopia.
Global visitors would flock there – not to London, Paris, or New York. Hundreds of millions of dollars in net proceeds would be shared by African countries.
As I stated in my petition: “The time is now as the world is going through revolutionary re-examination of past injustices, oppression, demonisation, and exploitation following the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American, by a racist European American police officer Derek Chauvin, in the U.S.”
Africans can’t talk of pan-African unity without reclaiming Africa’s past. There’s no lake Samori Ture or Thomas Sankara in France. There’s no Mount Mandela, River Nehanda, or Lake Nkrumah in Britain.
I’m happy to see the movement to reclaim Africa spreading throughout the continent, including in Uganda.
Last year, while visiting London I posted on Facebook my photo in front of a river the natives call “Thames.” I renamed it “Gulu River,” after my ancestral city.
A Kenyan tweeted the post. It has since been retweeted thousands of times. The BBC carried a story under the headline “Ugandan ‘explorer’ renames London river.”
I was giving the British a title taste of their own medicine. Other Africans started posing in front of monuments and rivers throughout Europe, renaming them after African icons. After the global Covid-19 lockdowns end, we must continue these explorations and “discoveries.”
Europeans made no discoveries in Africa. They were led by Africans to these landmarks they arrogantly renamed. They then turned around and abused the Africans as I point out in my book The Hearts of Darkness How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa (third edition coming out soon).
Samuel Baker, the virulently racist imperialist, wrote in Albert Nyanza, his 1866 book: “I wish the Black sympathisers in England could see Africa’s inmost heart as I do, much of their sympathy would subside... Human nature viewed in its crude state as pictured amongst African savages is quite on a level with that of the brute, and not to be compared with the noble character of the dog...”
Yet today, there’s a secondary school named after Baker in Gulu, Uganda. Even in death, Baker still mocks so-called “natives.”
These are some African legends deserving the honorific given to Victoria: Nkrumah, Mandela, Nyerere, Lumumba, Sankara, Machel, Biko, Kaunda, Winnie, Nehanda, Yaa Asantewaa, Nzingah, and others.
Brave general, Nehanda, was an anti-colonial resistance leader executed in 1898, at the age of 58 by the British in Zimbabwe. She was beheaded and her skull shipped off to England where it remains.
Nehanda’s legacy inspired the Zimbabwe liberation struggle led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. Her name should replace Victoria’s on the spectacular falls.
In the United States, statues of enslavers, including once revered Christopher Columbus, are coming down; in Britain, slave master Edward Colston’s statue fell. In Belgium, the statue of King Leopold who presided over a genocidal regime in Congo, fell.
The ball is in Africa’s court.
Paraphrasing and adapting Nkrumah’s statement: Seek Ye First Mental liberation, then all else, including economic and political empowerment, shall be added.
Africans arise!
Mr Allimadi is adjunct professor of African History at John Jay College
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