Pan-Africanism: The Quest to Know Our Place in Human History (Part 1)
5 min readBy Thiik Mou Giir, Melbourne, Australia
December 18, 2017 (SSB) — Without understanding our past very well, without acquiring adequate knowledge of our own history and, without sufficient attempt to see the world from our own perspective, the best visions and the best ideologies, Constructing Our New Identity (CONI) being one of them, will be doomed to suffer the same fate of frustration that met the visions and the ideologies that came before them. As the result, we will continue to depend on other people for our survival and we will continue to see the world from another people’s perspective.
What could have happened to people, like us, who seems to be depending on other people? The glaring answer is that they could have been brainwashed and they could have been lied to and for so long. What, then, is the status of people who are like that? They are simply a mentally enslaved people. They are people to be taken advantage of, people to be exploited. They walk around in the midst of other people thinking that they are free, but they are not. They are among slaves of 21st century in Africa and everywhere else.
We, the South Sudanese, must find out whether this is the case, whether we have been lied to and whether we have been mentally enslaved. We must seek to know the truth. We must find out our place in human history and learn how we have come thus far to this present point of time.
I wish I had Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X’s persuasion skills. Have I had their persuasion skills I could have convinced all South Sudanese people that those people who could permanently resolve our South Sudanese problems, in South Sudan as well as in diaspora, are the Lados, the Gatluaks, the Kenyis, the Nhials, the Alanys, the Otirs, the Awows and so on and so forth. These are the ones who can take us somewhere and not the non-South Sudanese people.
I could have told them, “The spark is that could bring us the lasting peace is within you. Be courageous, open up and let the spark catch the spark of your fellow South Sudanese around you and let it shine!
Even if I had Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X’s persuasion skills and was able to persuade my people to accept the vision I am trying to offer, the vision will not sit comfortably well on top of a lie, a lie that has been drilled into peoples’ mind for quite a long time. Construct Our New Identity is designed to bring people together; the lie has already divided our people.
Construct Our New Identity offers people to share their cultures out of which elements that will eventually form One Common South Sudanese Culture will emerge; a lie is already insisting that the vision is useless and will never work. Construct Our New Identity is associated with people becoming more creative; a lie is already destroying our societies and our communities.
Construct Our New Identity makes people see how they are progressing and how they are shaping their communities for a common good; a lie has confused and has robbed members of communities of their ability to solve the problems they are facing. We are in a paralyzing situation.
There are some people who would argue saying that the issues our people are facing were caused by poor leadership; President Salva Kiir, the former VP Dr Riek Machar, Jieng Council of Elders and many others are the ones that should be held accountable. I believe the problem is bigger than that. The problem, the lie has been drilled into those leaders, just as it has been drilled into each one of us.
We are all programed to hate one another. Even if these leaders leave the political, social, and military scene today, if we do not find the liberating truth, the problem will still exist. We must first, therefore, find the liberating truth and we must search for it in historical artifacts, in libraries, in Museums, local and foreign societies; in everything.
Our search for the truth should cover four thousand years before Christ (BC) and all the years after the birth of Christ (AD). It is worthwhile to know the truth, to know our place in history and to use what we would have learned in shaping our future.
It is bad for people to know that they are being mentally enslaved; it is worse when people who are being mentally enslaved do not even know that they are being mentally enslaved. Let us make the search for the truth be our long-term goal that starts in 2018.
Thiik Mou Giir, Bachelor Degree in Education from University of Alexandria, Egypt; Post Graduate Diploma, from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He can be reached via his email contact: thiik_giir@hotmail.com
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