Attempts by Europe and the West to modernize Africa seem to leave Africa increasingly alienated from its own history and culture. Caught betwixt influences from neo-colonialism and cravings for self-actualization, Africa’s increasing dilemma seems to produce a continuum of setbacks featuringin matters such aspolitics, statehood, industrialization, agriculture, fashioncultureand economy.Aptly, Sanford Ungar describes Basil Davidson’s The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State as probably the most concise indictment available of how colonialism and neo-colonialism, with help from capitalism and communism,turned the continentof Africa upside down.Davidson’s discourseis of major importance, not only about Africa, but about
In retrospect, while the African was busy chasing after ‘scarlet handkerchiefs’, little did s/he know that s/he was actually being systematically adapted towards raising cotton, sugar and other crops in the New World (Abodunrin, 2008:4). Furthermore, Abodunrin (2008:5), informs that prior to this time, to meet the need for a constant supply of cheap labour, the Europeans first turned to the aborigines and then to Africa. The reason for this U-turn in European thought could be found in the various mythical conceptions of the “African personality”. Some myths claimed that Blacks have been ordained by God to be perpetual slaves of the Whites, while another credited to Batholome de Las Casas, Bishop of Chiapa, Mexico, claimed that the work done by four American Indians could be done by one African. These myths, explains Abodunrin (2008:4), even though given the powerful support of religion which reified them to the level of divine essence, does not contradict the analysis of the historic contact of Europe and Africa as being primarily economic. On their part, racialist authors like Stanley Elkins went further to suggest that the experience of slavery produced in the African in the Americas, a “sambo” personality that is childlike in behaviour and character, a mental midget, a head-scratching, foot-shuffling over grown child, grovelling
To some, the continent is a depressing place whose people are bereft of the will to cope with political, economic and moral decline. Others are of the impression that the continent sits on superstition, resentment and xenophobia. According to Harris (1996), the rest of the world treat the African continent as a pet and view them with fear and loathing.Contrary to this uncouth mislabelling, the opinion of Parker et al (2001)is that the problem for historians is how to reconstruct the lived experience of individual Africans within narratives of social change, economic transformation and imperial conquest. Inwhat appears like a defence of Africa, according to his review of Darkest England, Harris (1996) reveals that Christopher Hope is not content with detailing the unwholesome diet and odd sexual practices of the English; he also finds even their impulses to do good sinister. According to him, once set upon that path, the English are merciless. Furthermore, he links “their current hypocrisies with the sins of their glory days, when the Bushmen were nearly exterminated”, suggesting that what they did to theirshare of the continent is “more than just a matter of kicking a little country when it is down”. It was a rape that seemingly escalated the dilemmic scenarios on the neo-African