Africa can't wish away the Berlin Experience

Dr. Mzee Wachanga

The year 1884 remains tragic for Africa. It marks a catastrophic beginning when Africa unwillingly set off on a journey of wretchedness. The continent’s destiny was tragically dictated in a meeting held in Berlin. Representatives from 14 countries attended the conference with Great Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal being the chief players. After three months of intense haggling over geometric partitioning of the continent, unholy pact, Berlin Act of 1885, was signed, allocating “spheres of influence” to represented countries. Partitioning was hurriedly done with sickening disregard to existing socio-political and econo-cultural establishments, which were indigenous in nature. Linguistic differences, intellectual endowments, and ethnic set-up of different communities were overlooked in this overpowering and mind-boggling process. Ethnic people with contrasting backgrounds ended up discordantly lumped together in restrictive colonies. Ethnic antagonism was consequently inevitable. The Biafran war in Nigeria is a regrettable example of ethnic intolerance between communities with disparate backgrounds.

More disturbing is the campaign that ensured, with the colonialists desperately putting measures in place intended to empty the Africans mind of its intellect. Africans identity was devastatingly, almost irredeemably distorted. By 1914, the continent was suffocating under the weight of the predatory colonialists.

Africans beliefs became superstitions; their religion became idolatry, their culture became barbaric, and their way of life became atavistic and primitive in the eyes of the colonialists. With colonialism proceeding from religious sentiments, the continent got a baptism name: Dark. Even with a baptism name, it was seen, albeit erroneously, as devoid of history, its only worth story being the existence of the colonialist, the rest being darkness, which is “not a subject of history.” It became a terra incognita to geographers, land of savages to anthropologists, home of the primitives in the eyes of ethnologists. Africans’ mind, it was contemptuously remarked was a blank slate yearning for Western civilization. Could Wole Soyinka had this in mind when he quipped that the Black race knows, and is content simply to know, itself? That it is the European world that has sought, with utmost zeal, to re-define itself through its encounter with Africa?

It is with a reason that David Livingston, one of the earliest explorers summed up the four European interests in Africa: Christianity, civilization, commerce and conquest. A story is told of how colonialists, hypocritically with the Holy Writ on one hand, pretending to be the harbingers of the Holy word, tricked African into closing their eyes in prayers. When Africans opened their eyes, their land had been taken away. Worse still, the Bible was not on sight anymore. Instead, there was a whip ready to be cracked and a gun, with a finger ready on the trigger, constantly pulled, at times just for fun.

Critically appraising the arduous journey the African continent has gone through, one is confronted by a harsh realization of the correlation between its more than century old history and its current predicaments. As Africa continues to wrestle with a seemingly impenetrable, though not a totally subjugating unholy trinity of illiteracy, poverty and diseases, its debilitating colonial past significantly acts as the prism through which its reality must be perceived.