SEARCHING THE HEART OF AFRICA

Great truths begin as blasphemy. So too blasphemous then to say, if you cannot believe in the story of your heartbeat -- that you live, why should vultures hovering about for their survival believe in you? There are many who do not still believe that Malawi, that Africa is capable of rising. It is the story of Africa.

And the story of Africa is beautiful. Well, “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it,” said the Chinese great teacher, Confucius and that was 479 years long before Christ the greatest teacher. That time, China was already a great a story before America and Europe.

All eyes at China now, and the word China literally almost “the centre of the world” and the ancient Chinese believed themselves to the “centre of civilization.” This was the heart of their faith – believing that the engine of social transformation was within their own heart. Not elsewhere, not far away in Europe or America. The Chinese had to discover themselves first. Now China has blossomed like a giant yellow flower unto the world.

Yet, much of Africa is made to believe that our development comes from the West. We almost think everything of the West is beautiful and everything that is “us” must be Westernised. Development and modernisation are “endogenous” – evolving from within and Europe herself transformed from within. This is what Alain Touraine, speaking on behalf of UNESCO, said in 1988. Why should Africa search herself elsewhere rather than within herself?

Aid will not develop Africa. We will develop Africa. Donors will not develop Malawi. We the people will develop our beloved country. And we will build Malawi with our hands. Some South Africans think we are the trash of their society because we have not stayed home to build our country.

Many intellectuals, those who should have taught us otherwise, think South Africa, the Tswana land and the land of the Swazi are the heavens of Africa. So they flee their beautiful motherland in search of greener pastures. Yet, we had no choice but to be born Malawian and we have no choice but to serve our country. That is why the Members of Parliament who play hide and seek with the lives of Malawians sound accursed every time they invoke disorder in the house of laws.
Politicians alone will not develop Malawi, but we together can develop the country. Having served at the highest in European politics as French President, General Charles de Gaulle knew better when he said, "Politics is too serious a game to be left to politicians." Political leaders will not tell our story. We owe our existence to noone but ourselves, and rising with a story of hope is our collective and sacred call. We cannot afford to keep calling Africa The Wretched of the Earth because our children will believe that they are so wretched that they cannot develop.

Yet, there are many prophets of doom and scribes who get thrilled with telling the darker side of our story. The more we do that, the more our children lose hope in our generation. The more we think we cannot develop, the more we cannot develop indeed. Such is the power of thought. Humans are made of their thoughts, and this is what the wonderful writer of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie says.

Yes, I never agreed with Stanley Kenani when his column once outlined the many reasons “Why Africans Cannot Develop”. His crime is that he had dared imply that we cannot develop, and all he sought us to know was “why”. I said, the only reason why we are not developing is because we think we cannot develop.

Surely, the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his story-teller. The rise of the British Empire began with their own story, which favoured them. They went around convincing us that they are the best of humanity. They elevated themselves first, and the prestige of English tells the story. Unlike all other languages, “they [the English] always write their first pronoun I with a capital letter,” says Robert Southey in Letters from England.

Then came a time when the Americans told us they have the biggest everything in the world. Freedom, wealth and fame were advertised as the heart of the American dream but that had to be won by thrift and hard work. They lived hardworking as a culture and they believed in it like all those who have risen to the heights social progress.

It is blasphemy to think of Blacks as incapable of hard work because God never created a single lazy race in his image. It was incredible hard work for Egyptians to build the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza alone has more than 2.3 million stones weighing 2.5 tons each on average, yet moved across miles of desert and placed with extreme precision until this “First Wonder of the World” towers 138m high. Cheikh Anta Diop writes that Civilisation of Ancient Egypt that invented writing (which Greeks and Romans only refined into the alphabet you are reading now), geometry, architecture, the calendar and was made of Black people and not those Arabs who occupied it thousands of years later.

The roots of European and American civilisations came from these intelligent Black people via the Greeks who copied much from Egypt. But because the story of the world is told by the West, the proverb of the Akan people has become true. The story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. A story is tasted by the tongue of he who tells it. That is what we must tell our story, the story of Malawi.

The story of Africa has mostly been a Euro-American story about us. Before the first European stepped his foot on Africa, so they say, this Africa had no history. Hugh Trevor-Roper is arrogantly blunt, “there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”.

They saw darkness, not because it was dark, but they saw darkness anyway. Remember Confucius – “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it.” Joseph Conrad simply concluded that Africa was a Heart of Darkness and proceeded to write a novel in that name. The rest of us were invisible.

But the story of the Invisible Man written by Ralph Ellison speaks of wisdom otherwise. The indivisible story-teller of this novel begins, “I am an invisible man…simply because people refuse to see me…That invisibility…occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes with whom I come in contact. [It is a] matter of construction of their inner eyes.”

Therefore seen Under Western Eyes – a story told by George Orwell, what could be seen in Africa was the jungle and some creatures that resembled humans. Today, the story of Heart of Darkness is repeated with fanfare and without shame. When most Europeans and Americans think of touring Africa, they come for the safari, to see the jungle and the animals. The humans of Africa are almost invisible – and the way tourism advertises Africa repeats the story of Africa as a Heart of Darkness because we highlight the beauty of the animals and jungles more than the story of the people and our abilities to civilise more.

While Europe was going through its Dark Ages, Africa was going through unprecedented civilization of beautiful and well organised cities, trading with China, India and Persia between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. China could exchange even diplomats with the rulers on the coast of Tanzania.

Yet, one man ignorantly says “Africa is an ahistoric continent [without history that is]…The people live in a condition of mindlessness and barbering without laws and morality.” His name was Friedrich Hegel, followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said “The black people are incapable of thinking in any reflexive manner”. Both of these are drunk by our university students as great thinkers, philosophers who failed to reason objectively about Africa.
We may laugh when the animals in a story called Animal Farm form a society based on one belief – “All animals are equal” only to change their own constitution to read “All animals are equal, but some more equal than others”. Well, there have been times when some Malawians were more equal than others.

But it is no laughing matter when the entire US President declares that “All men are created equal” only to contradict himself by announcing that “It would be impossible for a black person to understand the mathematical formula.” This was Thomas Jefferson, who has gone in memory as a man with “lifelong passion to liberate the human mind from tyranny, whether imposed … [of] our own ignorance.”

Yes, ignorance! How was Thomas Jefferson to know that there was a university in Timbuktu that with 25, 000 students by the 14th Century? This was before the West colonised us. And this is a lost story our school history books do not tell with any patriotic zest. Indeed, what is called “World History” in secondary school is nothing but European history. Colonialism robed us of our history.

But there are some who know better. Only recently, a delegation of European church leaders visited Africa and knelt down before former president of Mozambique and said, “We repent for robbing Africans of their history and identity.”

When President Bingu wa Mutharika one day after a trip to Kigali emphasised that we must be the first to tell our story, it is the restoration of our dignity and identity that he speaks of. No African country can meaningfully develop without deepening its sense of identity, history, dignity and destiny.

European history is full of lies. Europe was not the first to discover that the earth goes round the sun. African mathematicians in the 15th Century knew about “the rotation of the planets, knew about details of the eclipse” almost 200 years before the European Galileo and Corpernicus were to arrive at the same mathematical calculations. Probably, Europeans had not started of thinking of it as a possibility at all. Well, Galileo was almost hanged for his “sins” of discovery by the Catholic Church, then.

When Achebe sets out to tell the story of Africa in Things Fall Apart, he is doing exactly what Mutharika is asking Malawians to do. That novel is our true cultural representation that opposes the story of Europe about us. The culture of Things Fall Apart has its serious weaknesses and questions without easy answers.

Yet, those people in that novel value the sanctity of human life so that even a kinsman who commits suicide as Okonkwo does becomes a thing most loathed. They do fight what they call “the war of blame”, fighting for the sake of it – contrary to the thought that Africans were blood-thirst warmongers before colonialism. They love and value peace for they can dedicate an entire Week of Peace for this reason. When Okonkwo breaks this value and beats his own wife, he is punished for it.

Above all, Africans have been a people of every measure of human dignity, says Achebe in Things Fall Apart. These people did not hear of a civilised culture with the coming of the White man, they were not mindless – adds Achebe elsewhere but they had “flourishing industries – civilised to the marrow” as Robin Walker writes in his When We Ruled. As late as 1400, the people of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi were trading with Far East, and as far as China. We could brave and sail the high and far seas.

Indeed, “Without the help an anonymous East African sailor,” reports Stephen Williams, “it is doubtful that Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, would have succeeded in ‘discovering’ India.” We knew India before the earliest of their explorers claimed to have discovered it. Even when the Portuguese Francisco Alvarez came to Ethiopia to convert them to Christianity in the 1520s, he found only found the Ethiopian city of Lalibela which already had 11 underground Christian churches. There was nobody to convert to Roman Catholicism, and wondering whether the doubting Thomas of Portugal would believe it, this missionary wrote: “I swear by God, in whose power I am, that all that is written is the truth.”

Our cultures are not primitive or backward as we have been made to believe by the West. They only have their own internal weaknesses. But that is like any other culture. Even Western culture is confronted with serious moral questions. How can you call human beings who love to watch two bullies tearing each others flesh and bleeding in the name of Boxing a game of the civilised? While they come to teach my old mother about human rights and gendered rights, the woman is the most commodified and undignified humanity in the capitalist society of the West. Women are for advertising, even if it means undressing them for money! The list is endless.

Perhaps not much changed then. Instead of seeing darkness, they still see the bush first before they see human beings. They see the safari, the game. When I asked an American and a British history professors in England only this last September, “What do the British and American travellers desire to see first in Africa?” – these colleagues frankly and concurrently said, “the safari”. The animals first!

The way we advertise tourism both within Africa and Euro-America only promotes this image. We must invent construct our own Seven Wonders of Malawi which they must come to see – not just game. The image of game or safari still portrays us as the people of the bush where modern civilisation is remote from imagination.
Why should the Western tourist be invited to see the monkey more than the civilised wonders of our hands?

In order to “discover Africa…up and personal”, one tourist advert says, we must see the monkey captured in the heart of darkness. The designer had to ensure that the Chimpanzee symbolising Africa in the advert must be surrounded by an impervious thick black image – an image of darkness those who said Africa has no history talked about. Disturbing memories of the Western story that the African is close to the ape in his evolution, when you remember Charles Darwin’s impotent theory that Man evolved from the monkey, becomes inevitable in this advertisement of Africa. When some think of an African to be seen, then it is the nomadic Masai and some such tribes.

But now the story is changing. If they will not come to see the safari and the nomadic Masai whose culture is fine while they see him as part of game, they come to see poverty. They come to see The Wretched of the Earth! Yet, Africans can afford to share a beautiful smile in their material poverty, even to people we do not know.

The story of the richness of Africa remains untold. Noone tells us that the only mineral rock to have existed on the soils of Britain is a little coal – malasha. Much of the rest came from Africa. But nobody tells us the story of the poverty of England.

Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is the founder of Celtel but he was born in Sudan. He is not Western, not White but very successful. When he says, “We have shown that Africa is continent where you can conduct business successfully,” we are tried and found wanting – convicted because we often of investors as people who must come out of Africa. We want developed and big companies that come to Africa on a silver platter rather growing ours from a scratch. Look at Celtel today, with over 17 million subscribers in 15 countries! The riches are here, we are only trying to be mentally poor.

One of the richest men who ever lived on record but in the 14th Century was an African, generous, pious, dressed in Persian silk and his name was Mansa Musa of Mali. He once travelled with 60, 000 men on a pilgrimage to Mecca, including 12, 000 slaves – 500 of whom directly preceding him with “a staff of gold” each while he stately rode on a horseback.

Mansa Musa spent so much money in gold while in Egypt that the national economy collapsed after he left. “For years after Mansa Mussa’s visit,” writes Professor DeGraft Johnson, “ordinary people in the streets of Cairo, Mecca, and Baghdad talked about this wonderful pilgrimage – a pilgrimage which led to the devaluation of gold in the Middle East for several years.”
Africa has walked her wonderful pilgrimage to prosperity before the West invaded and destroyed our memory. These are wonderful memories we must tell – wondering: what type of history do we teach our children?

Malawi has a wonderful story to tell the world too. Yet, some choose to post the darker side of our wonderfully beautiful face while our little children to ask you and me: who robbed us of our beautiful history, identity, pride and sense of self-worth? What shall we say to the generation of our children, then?

A story is a trail of the blaze that tears apart darkness into blazing hope. The path to destiny is not possible without hope. But the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. Africa, tell me a story of hope.