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Africa cannot wait for a Moses like figure with rod in hand to come and save the continent, there should be African solutions to African problems.
This was the message from the first day of the Africa month festival programme which was rolled out for the month of May at the University of Witwatersrand on Friday.
Keynote speaker, renowned Kenyan academic and staunch Pan-Africanist Professor Patrick Lumumba, delivered a poignant address that looked at the very definition of democracy, denounced the attainment of power through coup d’etats in Africa and addressed the need for the industrialisation of African states.
Lumumba has served as the director of the Kenyan Anti-Corruption Commission from September 2010 to August 2011, and also as a director of the Kenya School of Laws since 2014. He is also the founding trustee of the African Institute for Leaders and Leadership.
As Africa Day (formerly African Freedom Day and African Liberation Day) looms, Lumumba questioned whether Africa was really free.
“Those who claim to be expects on Africa are in many cases not African and therefore when they write about Africa they write about it was if it was an object of curiosity.
“If you listen to former colonial states in their unguarded moments speak about former colonies, they still speak of them as if it were still their territories. And if they are speaking to them, they speak at them in a very condescending way,” said Lumumba.
The conceptual west, which includes Europe and the United States of America, “behaves as if they have a divine right to tell Africa what to do, and unfortunately Africans also behave as if they have a divine duty to listen to what they are being told,” added Lumumba.
When we cure our men using traditional medicine, science considers it as “voo-doo” but when former colonisers “take the same medicine from trees here in Africa and convert them to tablets this is called medicine.”
According to the academic, the solution is for Africans to liberate themselves from such intellectual colonisation through decolonising their minds.
“We (Africans) behave instinctively as if we are children of a lesser God,” and this needs to come to a stop if freedom is to be a reality in Africa, explained Lumumba.
He challenged academics when he asked, “if Wits is a world renowned university and we are teaching our children chemical and civil engineering, why is it that our roads and stadia are being built by the Chinese, what kind of civil engineering are we teaching?
“Why is it that tooth picks are made by the Chinese, and our eggs imported from Romania, have our own chickens forgotten how to lay eggs?” questioned Lumumba.
Academic Mbuso Khoza, who is also an award-winning vocalist and songwriter, as well as Wits University PhD candidate Kholeka Shange, who also shared the podium with Lumumba, concurred with the sentiments that decolonisation of the academic space was a necessity.
The pair argued that their own studies have introduced Princess Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu into the Wits school of arts cannon, which demonstrates the need for a redefinition of academic cannon for previously disadvantaged races to locate themselves in the cannon.
Lumumba concluded that African states need to stop saying “we gained independence, and correctly say we regained our independence as it was taken from us.”
