Even after watching The Matrix, The Adjustment Bureau, The Truman Show, EXistenZ, Ready Player One, and the huge assortment of movies depicting life as a simulation, even after consorting with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we have not learned the lesson. The lesson is that life is a dream, a movie, and we get to choose what flavour it will be. We get to write the script.
Africa’s blueprint and script was written between 1884 and 1885 at the Berlin Conference which was hosted by the diabolical German Chancellor of the time, Otto von Bismarck, with large influence of the extremely sadistic King Leopold II of Belgium. Under Bismark, 800,000 lives were needlessly lost in war. Leopold’s rule saw the cutting off of hands and feet as punishment for Congolese people who failed to meet their rubber quotas, and used severed hands as currency – requiring soldiers to bring back a hand for every bullet they fired to prove that they were killing and not wasting ammunition. Leopold routinely kidnapped and held women and children hostage to force men to gather rubber, burned down villages and flogged workers to death.
And so the founding of present-day Africa, the writing of what we may call the ‘African Dream’ can be traced to these two. This ‘African Dream’ is however in truth really just a nightmare, as evidenced by the hundreds of Africans who die daily as they swim to Europe in search of a better life, as is evidenced by the phenomenon where hundreds of Africans would camp outside Western embassies all night before visa appointments, seeking to escape their short, brutish and cruel daily realities.
Pan-African organizing and Pan-Africanist fervour would emerge a few years later with the first Pan-African Conference taking place at Westminster Town Hall in London in 1900, and WEB Dubois organising the first modern Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, accelerating the movement.
Given how many of these early and late genuine Pan-Africanists ended up killed by the West and their agents (Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral, Muammar Gaddafi, among others), with no tangible and structural legacies to their names, and the fact that the boundaries set up at the Berlin Conference still stand, it would be romanticizing history and lying to ourselves if we failed to acknowledge that they were successful in setting up a new African Dream. The imperialists of the Berlin Conference are the ones the citizens of present day Africa can trace their true lineage to.
Among the African resistance movements of the 19th and 20th century, the intellectual movements could be said to have been the most successful. The fighters of resistance wars in Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, were betrayed, humiliated, and dispossessed, their descendants left as the wretched of the earth. But intellectual movements led by writers and philosophers such as Negritude in the 1930s and 1940s, and the historic African Writers Conference in Uganda in 1962, are movements that I argue were hugely successful.
They were successful not in forcing colonialists to leave, or in raising the GDP of their countries. They were successful in articulating and birthing a collective consciousness, where before there had been silence, darkness, chaos and fog. This is no small thing. Acknowledgement of a feeling, expression of a sentiment, and the articulation of an idea, wish, dream and aspiration, is key to the movement and direction of a body.
An example would be if one put their hand on a hot stove. The nerve endings of the hand would register and acknowledge pain, the mouth might find itself saying, “Ow!”, the hand would find itself reflexively pulling away from the hot stove, the feet might find themselves taking a step away from it.
One challenge post-independent African nations have had is that they are still fragmented, the varied parts of the social, economic and political body are not in concert. They are not in harmony, they are not aligned, they do not speak to each other. If anything, they are even hostile and antagonistic to each other. If it would be a body, this would be the equivalent of one body part attacking another, which in medicine we call illness.
Colonialism and the colonial experience was traumatic, and even though half a century has gone by, Africa still exhibits the trauma symptoms of learned helplessness, self-sabotage, dependency, dissociation, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, and overall dysfunction. It is manifest in the type of leaders we elect, the policies we set up, and how African countries remain in service to the West, rather than to their people. The people are subjects, entities to extract from, exploit and oppress, rather than beings to be nurtured and encouraged towards healthy growth.
Facing up to truth is a big part of trauma healing. As a continent, we have never really made peace with our beginnings, we have never really acknowledged that our founding ‘parents’ were a psychotic, bloodthirsty, deranged, psychopathic group. We need to do this. We need to reckon with, acknowledge and accept where we have come from, before we can move forward and write a new script, laying out new dreams, setting out new visions.
I would lay this responsibility on the writers, the intellectuals, and the artists; usually, the only sane people in deeply troubled households, institutions and nations.
