By Prince Justice Jadesola Faloye
Prof PLO Lumumba, Dr Ifatunde Umar Johnson and Julius Malema speeches raise the passion and consciousness of Africans worldwide, especially with their Pan Africanism that touches on Black political leadership, economic deprivation and cultural disorientation, caused by White Supremacy doctrines and the international financial caste system. I recently watched a video of Prof Lumumba questioning the fate of Pan Africanism and being the solution to many of our problems. He stated that if Africans don’t get rid of their Pan Tribalistic perspectives, many African nations will break up within the next few decades and will be recolonized. The question arises that if we Africans can’t cohabitate peacefully and progressively in our present neocolonial straitjacket nationstates, how are we expected to unite into a bigger conglomeration of Black African peoples? Is it not a case best understood from Karl Marx Social Reproduction theory, that regardless of the institutions and constitutions adopted by Africans, it will be a case of garbage in garbage out?
Pan Africanism has mainly been a geographic concept without much attached to the different cultures and civilizations. The Pan Africanist masterplan has been economic unification followed by political union, but as Dr Roger Amos rightly stated in his book, Blueprint for Black Power, culture, economics and politics are intertwined since Culture is the way we do things, politics is the way we organize to do things while economics is the means used to organize to achieve things, so without culture taken into consideration, economics and politics will fail.
Pan Africanism push for continental unity makes one ask what is a continent and it’s relationship with politics and culture. As Confucius stated the first step of good governance is the rectification of terms. In reality Europe is not a continent, since a continent is a large landmass surrounded by water, and therefore part of Eurasia. Europe is more of a civilizational and racial concept that differentiates it from Asia. Europa meaning the Eu (good) Op(face) is (area) like Ethiopia, the Burnt face area, the land of Blacks. Infact, Western academia input the civilizational considerations of naming the Indigenous African area as sub-Saharan.
Indigenous Africans underwent colonial epistemicide, the denigration and killing of our episteme, the knowledge of our origins, true identity and aspirations, which if not addressed we can’t successfully engage in nation building. There are two civilizations across Africa – the Afroasiatic civilization made up of different peoples that underwent various Eurasiatic imperialism but united by Abrahamic dogma, while the other is the Indigenous African civilization made up of the 2240 tribes that are a continuum of dialects, known as the Niger-Congo ethnolinguistic family, who share the same genetic and cultural origins traced to Nigeria. It was European imperialism that broke the Original African civilization into artificial tribes, whereby a dialect is chosen out of a multitude of dialects in an area to become th standard language of the new social construct called tribes. The dialect chosen as the standard tribal langauge was institutionalized by having the Bible written in it and making it the language of colonial communication. The difference between the standardized languages of two adjacent new created artificial tribes became pronounced since the continuum linking the them are obscured. However, despite the tribal standardization, and the epistemicide that trashed our true history and identity, we like all the three other major civilizations – Judeo-Christian, Afroasiatic and Buddhist – still retain some of our civilizational philosophical attributes.
Africans philosophy is mainly based on binary complementarity while those of the other civilizations are based on Binary Opposition. Africans in the real sense don’t do religions whereby they worship an Almighty God, but practice what is better described as African Spiritual Science. African belief systems don’t separate God from Satan since we scientifcally know that you cant separate negative from positive, from the small atom to humans and Almighty God. To us, God is both good and evil, just like all human beings, and there is no Satan that monopolizes evil nor is God good all the time.
European coloniality has robbed us of a vital stage of aggregation, which is the one between tribalism and universalism called civilizationalism. This is why we arrived at the concept of Pan Africanism without taking cognizance that Africa is made up of two civilizations. Despite it been clear that the first imperialists in Africa were the Asiatic, and most recently while fighting for the African decolonization, we fought under different umbrellas of the Black Power movement brought back by Nnamidi Azikwe from Philadelphia universities and spread to Ghana’s Nkrumah before East, Central and Southern Africa, while Afroasians united under the Pan Arab Movement.
Today, we have the Maghreb North African nations push the Pan Arab Lobby in the African Union while the Original African civilizations made up of numerous Black African tribes and nations cannot unite to save their souls. Afroasians being half African and half Asiatic, either by blood, language or social organization, naturally take to their richer and more successful family side, which is why they work with the European Union to set an immigration boundary to keep away indigenous Africans from the Mediterranean coasts. Yet we talk of Pan Africanism of uniting the whole continent of Africa regardless of the different races and irreconcilable philosophical differences. Even though some Africans are Black, we would find that African Americans not only respect their African origins and have a higher Niger Congo DNA of 75% than groups like Fulani that push the Afroasiatic civilization and have just 49% Niger Congo DNA.
Nnamidi Azikwe made the mistake of Pan Africanism without civilizationism when due to colonial divisive social engineering between Yoruba and Igbo, the two most populous Indigenous African groups, he choose to align with the Fulani led Afroasiatic imperialistic civilization, which resulted in their undue power and hegemony used to subjugate the entire Indigenous African civilization that made up 70% of the Nigerian population. The Fulani Afroasiatic civilization is more geared towards unity to the Maghreb and Middle East that they claim are their origins than to indigenous Africans, which is why Nigeria has not been able to throw it’s full weight behind Black African unity.
It was Archimedes that stated give me a place to stand and I will move the world, unfortunately our academia has failed to give us a civilizational platform to stand and unite. As known, it is who pays the piper that dictates the tune, so our academia continue to push the coloniality of knowledge sources that only serves to obscure our common Original African genetic and cultural origins and linkages. Not only did they disfigure our true origins and identity in their history books, but even tried to confuse us with genetic studies that clearly show the origin of humanity and our culture to be those now called the Yorubas in Southern Nigeria. Even without linguistic evidence that shows that the larger subgroup of the Niger Congo ethnolinguistic family called the Benue-Congo ethnolinguistic family evolved from the confluence of River Niger and Benue, listening to the accent of Prof Lumumba and Malema shows close similarities to those of northeast and North Central Nigeria.
We have more than enough evidence to show the West African origin of humanity, and how the Volta Niger subgroup later evolved into the Benue Congo subgroup that migrated out through the River Benue and Lake Chad’s River Chari into Cameroon, down the Sangha River via Gabon into the Kongo River basin, where those known as Western Bantus settled, then up the Ubangi River to the Central Africa lakes/River Nile area where the Marshariki Bantus spread to the East African coasts and down to the South African Ngunilands. Our genetic and cultural linkages have to be taught to every African to free us from the restrictive Pan Tribalistic perspectives, as well as our common philosophical attributes. Like every Afroasians knows the Crescent of the Moon/Scimitar as their civilizational totem and the European Christians recognize the Cross/Spatha as their civilizational totem, every indigenous African should know that the leopard/cheetah/panther is the African civilizational totem.
It is only after understanding our civilization that we can gainfully employ it as the foundation of our institutions and nations, and also develop civilizational goods and economics to uplift ourselves. Currently, all African governments are run by a neocolonial guard that owes it’s allegiance to foreign civilizations which is why they have not uplifted the people they are supposed to represent. We at ASHE Foundation have suggested that to make our electoral commission truly independent and political.system truly representative, our long term cultural leadership and stakeholders should be the ones to choose leadership and membership of the electoral bodies and serve as the guarantors of the system run by professional politicians who are short termist by nature. Modernism prevents us from understanding that Western democracies were formed and backed by their monarchs.
Following the 1832 abolition of African slavery, under the auspices of Queen Victoria, European conservatism was born, to keep Blacks at bay, leading to the mid 1800s formation of the UK Conservative Party, US Republican Party as well as Christian Democratic Parties across continental Europe. About fifty years later, the working classes created worker Parties to push for the rights of White workers from their Conservative landlords and employers that were apt to use cheap Black labour to keep wages down. All other civilizations also back their governance systems and keep out other civilizations, with China even forming a civilizational state. Unfortunately, Africans could only move from tribalism to universalism which made a mess of their sociopolitical and economic existence.
It is only after Original African civilizationism has been well articulated and disseminated to every African that we can save our nations and unite on the international stage for global racial parity. A united Original African civilizational lobby is required to come to the negotiations table in the African Union, to counter Arab Lobby imperialistic designs, like making the East African Afro-Arabic trade language Swahili our official language. A united Original African civilizational unity can negotiate better in the UN for the Black Race. Afroasiatic civilizations use Caliphates as geographic demarcations, while the concept of nationstates is a product of European imperialism first used by the Dutch in 1600s to keep it’s proceeds of African exploitation to itself away from the Roman and French empires, and globalized after the Napoleonic wars and the independence of Haiti, so we should concentrate on civilizational states.
This shouldn’t be viewed as divisive like the Western nations are apt to categorize pro-Black as anti-White. We are not discriminating against our Afroasiatic cousins but only trying to accentuate our common civilizational origins, experiences and aspirations, which would help them to appreciate their African side, ultimately towards a loose federation of African ethnicities for the self determination of our culture, free from cultural imperialism within and from outside.
Prince Justice Jadesola Faloye, President ASHE Foundation is the author of The Blackworld: Evolution to Revolution and other books, documentaries etc
