Cultural Emancipation: Let’s Learn From Our African Geniuses
6 min readBy PaanLuel Wël, Juba, South Sudan
We are not anybody’s burden; we are masters in our own house. We are confident in ourselves and of the future. There are those who might entertain the false beliefs that we cannot govern ourselves, we should not and cannot let their thought patterns influence us. Let us collectively go down in history as the generation of South Sudanese that turned Sudan around by putting an end to discrimination, racism, inequality, division, exploitation, and marginalization at best, and slavery and casual murder at worst. Let us unite against ethnic, religious, and racial divides to restore personal dignity for all. Let us move from total economic dormancy to total vibrancy; from relegation and resignation to a cycle of poverty, destitution and misery to activism, hope, and excitement. Let us reject being mere spectators in life, to becoming masters of our own destiny—The Late SPLM/A Leader, Dr. John Garang, Addressing his army officers in Yei, South Sudan, during the war of independence.
April 27, 2015 (SSB) —- Much has been said and written about the need for capacity building not just in South Sudan but also across the Sub-Saharan Africa region.
Lack of capacity among the civil servants and national leaders have attracted plethora of Western expatriates—many of whom are ready, willing, and possibly able, to offer their best minds to solve the daunting task of governance in Sub-Saharan Africa in general and South Sudan in particular.
Decades later, and with billions of dollars disbursed, however, hardly anything has changed in the living standard of the African people.
In spite of this, South Sudan is still expending millions of dollars a year on foreign expatriates in the vain hope of realizing economic development, political stability and social prosperity for her people.
It is high time we, the African people, start looking for salvation from within rather than from outside. No deliverance will ever come from Washington DC, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, etc.
Instead of depending on foreign expatriates, most of whom are fresh graduates experimenting with textbook theories, we should learn from our own African geniuses. Africa has great political and economic, social and cultural, philosophers we can learn from to solve our present-day predicament.
Among the great African revolutionary leaders we can learn from are: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania,Nelson Mandela of Azania, Patrice Lumumba of DR Congo, and our own John Garang of South Sudan, to mention but just a few.
From the Diaspora community, we have inspirational African thinkers in the persons of William Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglas, George Padmore, and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others.
But if we are to reclaim out roots, if we are to learn from the wisdom of our own African wise men, what exactly, the naysayer might wonder, are we going to learn from them?
Well, as Amilcar Cabral advises us, we must always remember “our own reality—however fine and attractive the reality of others may be—can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices…”
What this mean is that, in most cases than not, it is necessary for the African people to find their own formula for solving their societal tribulations because solutions to certain problems in some parts of the world are “not exportable commodities” in the form of foreign expatriates or experts.
Accordingly, what we should, and must, learn from our African giants is the kind of education Africa needs to produce the best leaders to unravel its sociopolitical and economic fiascoes and advance its technological prowess.
The goal therefore would be to “produce a type of student, who is Western in his intellectual attitude towards life, with respect for science and capacity for systematic thought, but who remains African in sympathy and desirous in preserving and developing what is deserving of respect in tribal life, customs, rule and law.”
Such kind of African-centered educational system“will produce devoted men and women with imagination and ideas, who, by their life and actions, can inspire our people to look forward to a great future.” Nonetheless, “as the aims and needs of our society change, so our educational institutions must be adjusted and adapted to reflect this change.”
Take ‘The African Genius’, the 1963 inaugural speech of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah for instance, one of those moving speeches illustrative of the very “kind of education Africa needs in order to produce the kinds of leaders Africa needs.” Kwame Nkrumah tells us that by ‘The African Genius’, he “mean something positive, our socialist conception of society, the efficiency and validity of our traditional statecraft, our highly developed code of morals, our hospitality and our purposeful energy.”
The major setback with our current leadership in Africa, says Cabral, is that most of them are “strung up to defend their immediate interests, see no further than the end of their nose, and reveal themselves incapable of simply bringing national unity into being, or of building up the nation on a stable and productive basis.”
Thus, the indispensability of learning from our African geniuses because they are transformational figures who would inspire innovative thought and positive action and persuade us to demand more through action for the greater good of Africa. They are the experts who truly understand not just what is wrong with Africa but also what is needed to move forward.
Education, says Kwame Nkrumah, is the “gateway to the enchanted cities of the mind and not only as a means to personal economic security and social privilege. Indeed, education consists not only in the sum of what a man knows, or the skill with which he can put this to his own advantage. In my view, a man’s education must also be measured in terms of the soundness of his judgment of people and things, and in his power to understand and appreciate the needs of his fellow men and to be of service to them.”
Indeed, there is plenty that we can learn from the great revolutionary leaders and political philosophers of Africa. We should therefore shun foreign ideas that have been proven ineffective. Let’s embrace our own African geniuses in order to achieve our economic, social, and political progress and to unify and uplift people of Africa.
We need to change the cultural mindset that underpin most of our policies in managing our public affairs. Only with cultural emancipation shall we talk of Africa as “The Rising Continent” of the 21st century.
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PaanLuel Wël, the Managing Editor of PaanLuel Wël: South Sudanese Bloggers, is a South Sudanese national currently residing in Juba, South Sudan, where he works for one of the International NGOs. He graduated with a double major in Economics and Philosophy from The George Washington University, Washington D.C, USA. He is the author of “Return in Peace (R.I.P) Dr. John Garang” and the editor of the speeches of Dr. John Garang, published as “The Genius of Dr. John Garang, Vol. 1 &2“. He is currently working on two books to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Dr. John Garang: Vol. 3 of “The Genius of Dr. John Garang” and “Who Killed Dr. John Garang“, an account of events and circumstances leading to the death of the late SPLM/A leader in July 20005. You can reach him through his email: paanluel2011@gmail.com
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