Do you ever wonder why Africans, irrespective of where they are in the world, are the oppressed, the bottom wrung, why Africa is poor and will continue to remain so comparative to Americas, Europe, Asia or Middle East?
The answer is complex but it is also very simple.
Knowledge.
Basically, knowledge systems and how they generate everything and more importantly, how they create and maintain power.
Those systems that create ideas, that generate k on how to solve the millions of human problems generate and maintain power globally.
Our problem is that we are existing on borrowed everything.
Borrowed philosophies.
Borrowed language.
Borrowed religion.
Borrowed governance and political systems.
Borrowed morality.
Borrowed economic structures.
Borrowed technology.
Is there any technology that has originated from us?
How about how we speak?
Our clothes.
Our moral reasoning.
I can guarantee that almost everything you consider valuable to you today has not originated from your people.
We are primarily consumers of other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge systems, other people’s political and governance structures, other people’s economic structures, other people’s religions, etc
We will always be enslaved by what we borrow.
Anybody who exists on borrowed everything cannot by design implement anything better than those who originated it and have perfected it for years decades or even hundreds of years.
The solution: we have to be producers. Producers of knowledge so powerful that other people have no chance but adopt it to solve their problems.
We can shout slavery for 1000 years and plead with other people to recognize our humanity but that will never change the power balance.
The only solution is to build systems that create, systems that originate solutions for our problems and the world’s problems.
Every single place on this earth has resources, but it is knowledge that determines how resources can be exploited for the betterment of the population the center of knowledge production determines who benefits from the resources.
The best solution, the most efficient, will always be adopted by other people, and that adoption always means the adoption of all the underlying assumptions of that knowledge system including its culture.
Let's change in the coming decade. Let's make it the African decade. 2020 to 2030 let us recreate Africa, decolonize mindsets and make Africa a first world continent.
#TogetherWeCan make Afrika great again
Linda Tsungirirai Masarira
African at Heart
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