Were it not for history's capacity to conciliate egregious actions of yore committed against the African continent, Africa would continue to be a continent very much at war, with a people remaining fiercely racist.
Looking back 45 years to the Cold War – a tense confrontation that pitched two superpowers of US and USSR on the brink of war – the assassinations, both successful and attempted, that abounded from Congo’s Lumumba in 1961 to US’s Kennedy in 1963, and Ghana’s Nkrumah in 1966 is sufficient to perpetually enrage the psyche of Africans.
It is not enough to have endured the slave trade of the nineteenth century, which in a UN-sponsored conference on racism in 2001, Western powers refused to give reparations for, but to be consistently dictated to, and be consistently denied the continent’s capacity to industrialise, by way of execrable trade policies that progressively hurt and hinder its development in the twenty-first century when Africa has a collective wherewithal to fend for itself, beggars belief that Africa continues to do business with those who suppressed and killed our ancestor’s souls two centuries ago.
Fine, Africans were equally bribed and corrupted to exact that degree of calamity on the continent, but that does not do away the glaring fact of their objective: throw the so-called Dark Continent into ever-more obscurity, by reducing it to one merely for extraction of minerals and resources.
It is one of the reasons why that anger has compelled me to write this biting tribute to Patrice Lumumba who, ostensibly inspired by Ghana’s Nkrumah, failed to muster sufficient support from those whom he felt could assist – the United Nations and the Russians – to rescue him from a fate worse than the proverbial death: the cutting up of his body and dissolving into acid just because he dared to speak the truth about the atrocities that the Belgians had visited on his country.
Today, I say SHAME to Belgium for having killed this man, and SHAME to the US for having had a President under the name of Eisenhower who ordered his death because of the distorted view that the man, fighting for his country, was a Communist.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment