We always had a civilization and history greater than our colonizers; how did they even colonize us?

By Ernest Ogezi

“Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses”

1691: an account of a Portuguese Captain.

Africa is the oldest civilization in the world and humanity’s one true ancestral home. How come the motherland is so poor, plagued by diseases and relegated to global politics? Because we are a people that have tolerated too much, our histories have been distorted and, it seems, all superpowers have to stand on our broad shoulders to achieve global relevance. Nothing is worse than the fictionalization of Africa as a dark place in need of light. Most of the global powers you know have had to exploit the African continent for resources, slave manpower and territory, before rising to supremacy.

The African race is a powerful race that has refused to crack despite all that has been thrown at it. No race can survive and thrive in the form of mental and physical torture the African race has been put through and still exist. Only us. As professor Wole Soyinka put it, “the African continent had gone through the history of hell.”

History has not been fair to the African and most of our most remarkable achievements have been obliterated from history and replaced by travesties. The manipulation of history is so powerful that we have all but forgotten that we had proud empires, chiefdoms, tribes and traditions that were admired by many and envied by all. This is mainly attributed to the works of early Eurocentric historians that held on to the belief that Africa had no history predating the intrusion of European explorers.

British explorer Henry M. Stanley popularized the phrase ‘Dark Continent’ about Africa, contradicting an earlier concession that he had read 130 books on Africa before he left for the mission. The Enlightenment saw Europeans develop new standards and tools for mapping, and instead of consolidating on existing popular maps, many of which had more details, they simply erased lakes, mountains and cities from these maps and ‘discovered’ what Africans had led them to. How is it possible to discover mountains, lakes and kingdoms that existed even before your progenitors were born? But that was exactly what happened.

A Nigerian historian who regards himself as a ‘student of history’, Tersee Shina Kosu, believed that in Nigeria, the history, first bastardized by the Westerners was perpetuated by the political elites. The elites exploited this gap in history to attain their own claim to power. He also opined that the African definition of ethnicity was tainted to keep us pursuing a superficial, moribund sociological ethnic perception designed by amateur anthropologists and ethnographers writing with the biased mind of coming to exploit the African continent.

What would be referred to as standardization of language is a systematic method of inducing the African with ethnocentrism. Standardization of language refers to the consequence of the propagation of ideals including religion and politics. For the British, when the Holy books were translated into indigenous tribes, they were done by selecting the dominant dialect and transforming it into the language of the region. This language is used as the means of communication between the Master and subjects. The prioritization of this tribe over others effectively began the relegation of other tribes within the same locale. In some cases, the elite members of the other tribes began to align with the chosen tribe to the detriment and denigration of their own.

There were an estimated 10,000 independent states in Africa, with distinct cultural and linguistic identities before the arrival of Western colonialists. The oral, archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence available even up to this day, give credence to the fact that we actually had a history, equally significant or even more significant than those of our colonizers. Even though the history of Africa is challenged by the absence of comprehensive written records or holistic archaeological evidence. This is the reason why alien historians like Trevor-Roper can say “Africa had no history prior to European exploration and before on, that there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”, her only history “the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.” Hegel followed a similar part to say, “Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit”. To believe these ideologies is to be bereft of common logic: how can a people who had existed millennia before your incursion lack history?

Africa suffered more than any other people in history, for some reason the entire world saw Africa as a ripe place for pillaging. Walter Rodney believed that Africa developed Europe at the same rate that Europe underdeveloped Africa. The trans-Atlantic slave trade lasted for more than four centuries, weighing heavily on Africa and was a precursor to an even more horrible social cleansing – colonialism.

The New Imperialism (or Partition of Africa), a period between 1881 and 1914, formalized the exploitation of Africa for the benefit of Europe. It sanctioned the invasion, occupation, division, and colonization of most of Africa by seven Western European powers. Where Europe only had a formal hold on Africa of 10 per cent in 1870, it gained a 90 per cent hold by 1914. In these years, Africa was robbed naked and the mental institutionalization of White supremacy was actualized. It is only in Africa that the entire world converged to exploit, and in a sense, decide our futures and economic progression on a table we were absent at.

The institutionalization of White supremacy and the allusion of African primitivity, perhaps initially a strategy for occupation and exploitation, became indoctrinated to the extent that this allusion gradually became the norm. Europeans and other Caucasians actually, honestly, began to believe that they were superior to black people. The result has been seen in the manner people of African descent have been treated all around the world. But no result is worse than the way and manner indoctrination has caused Africans to hold a condescending opinion about themselves. In essence, and even for people that are not originally African, there is a loud silence that predicates supremacy by the extent to which your skin tone is closer to the Caucasian hue.

But how truly civilized is the African?

Africans had established their culture, science, navigation systems, and religions long before the Europeans ever did. We did not establish nations like the west, and we did not need to, but African kingdoms had already established trade with Middle Eastern and Asian states for more than two millennia. Ancient African cultures were responsible for developing entire mathematical systems, charting the sun and creating calendars. Africans sailed to South America and Asia long before Europeans did. Africa had more techniques and tools that surpassed Roman technology and great empires, libraries and universities that the Europeans could only dream of.

Africa has been able to exist although it has been pillaged for centuries. The pillaging has not ended up to this day. There are arguably no other continent or peoples that can survive all that has been placed on Africa and still exist. The resources and talents of Africans have built most of the world, including America, although they have not been credited with it. The most important component of our civilization is the fact that we have been able to maintain our humanity. Forced to scramble for a capitalist economy we neither understand fully nor profit from, Africans have remained cheerful in their songs their lives and their art forms. Even though ethnocentrism has been forced upon us, the African is still capable of a pure form of love and a sense of community.

Even as latent forces continue to pull apart the fabric of brotherhood from within, and especially from without, Africa is still here. We are still able to collect ourselves, and when all else is gone, we will still be here. We have inherited the genetic superiority from our ancestors and the superior ability to survive the worst and therefore, we are the perfect example of a truly fit entity that will survive plagues, torments, pillaging and the apocalypse that man has brought and continues to bring upon himself.