Like the dog that hasten to its demise because it refused to listen to the hunter’s (not Hunter Biden, silly) whistle, the West, especially France, is careening into an abyss in its relationship with Africa, especially with West Africa.
My Yoruba people have loads of cautionary tales to warn us against misadventures.
One of them is that of the Tortoise who, on visiting his in-laws was asked when he would return, Tortoise replied: When I am disgraced!
Keen and objective Observers of the uprisings across the Francophone West African countries would have known that it was a disaster that was fated to happen.
It was never a question of if, but when.
Unfortunately, as usual, Western officials and their sycophantic media express both shock and outrage as planeloads of Westerners are hastily evacuated from Niger as relations between France and its most loyal vassalage in ECOWAS turned sour and nasty!
Really, guys!
Sorry, but I, and thousands of honest commentators, did our best to warn that the neocolonial world Europe/West constructed is not only immoral, inhumane, and inhuman, it cannot endure.
Let another Yoruba proverb assist us here: ile ti a ba fi ito mo, iri ti yio wo / The house built with spittle will be felled by dew.
In angry polemics, satires, analyses, and whatnots, we warned that neocolonial structures will fall because of their own illogical contradictions.
We were scorned and abused. We were termed agitators, anti-western, angry Africans who represented no one. A Dutch commentator called yours truly the new Malcolm X like I was remotely fit to be compared to the Great Man.
Rather than to engage us in healthy discussion on how best to build a win-win relationship between Europe and Africa, European media ignored us, they instead reached out to those whose color of skin is like theirs. These liberal bleeding hearts were given platforms and promoted beyond their qualifications, and were installed as African Experts and Specialists.
Europeans never see the irony of other Europeans speaking FOR Africa in 2023.
So, today, the proverbial shit has hit the fan. We now see Western officials scrambling for answers that stared them directly in the face. Answers that WE tried to provide for them at no cost.
Coming from a people that pride themselves on their rationality, it beggars belief that Europeans expected/expect Africans to accept that which any thinking and rational people would reject outright!
Just one example should suffice: What informed the French to pay 5% to Niger for the uranium and kept 95% for themselves?
We all can understand the human propensity for greediness, but this level of greed is not just too much, it bothers on insane insult and outright provocation! Only idiotic fools and slaves would put up with that type of affair for any length of time.
Of course, Western officials, media, and the pseudo-intellectuals with their bs degrees will never refer to Niger without the prefix: "the poorest country in the world," and without telling the world that the country is actually one of the richest nations in terms of mineral wealth which the French brazenly and unashamedly loot.
Questions that Europeans refused to ask themselves and which we have tried to drum into their brains include: What exactly is it that makes it impossible for Europeans, who claim to be the smartest creatures on earth and beyond, to want to play in a level field where they can dazzle us with their superior intellect?
Why do Europeans always seek special privileges with all the odds are stacked in their favour?
What is in the European DNA that makes them feel so entitled to other peoples’ wealth and resources?
Why do Europeans, who gallivant around the world to preach such niceties as “universal love”, “love your neighbor as thyself”, and “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us”, so unwilling to abide by their preaching?
Or, where in the wide world do we see Europeans forgive real or imagined enemies?
Until Europeans sit down and ask themselves these rather simple questions, they will continue to be surprised by shocking news like those from the Sahel.
Unless Europeans learn how to live like the rest of us simple human beings, without privileges, they will continue to be buffeted by the sights of planeloads of their compatriots repatriated from lands they have brutally and callously exploited for centuries.
Not only must one be totally purblind not to notice the tectonic shifts in the geopolitical world order, one must certainly be delusional not to notice that the neat order that Europeans constructed to stack all the aces in their favor is being upended at dizzying speed.
Europeans should remove the racist blinkers from their eyes and begin to construct their lifestyles to reflect the new geopolitical realities. The era of free exploitation of other people’s resources is bless-fully coming to an end. Every human of conscience should partake in hurrying it along.
Rather unfortunate for Europeans, they did not listen to one of their own thinkers, Jean-Paul Satre, who told them decades ago:
“The time of the boomerang has arrived… You can see it’s the end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun; all that our hired soldiers can do is to delay its completion.”
"What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?"
It is quite uncanny how visionaries like Satre foresaw the fate that awaited Europe.
Another prophet whose prophecies have been most uncanny was Frantz Fanon. Listen to him, warning us six decades ago: “When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man and an avalanche of murders…
“Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration…
“Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to avoid it with all possible speed..."
Of course, Europeans, like the proverbial Emperor, refuse to see their nakedness, their BBC, DW, Radio France, etc continue to generate the necessary lullabies to turn them into the most abjectly-zombified people on earth.
©️Fẹmi Akọmọlafẹ
August 6, 2023
Fẹmi Akọmọlafẹ is a farmer, writer, and published author.
His latest book, “Africa: a Continent on Bended Knees” is available on:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Africa-Continent-Bended-Femi-Akomolafe-ebook/dp/B08FGZNJ5T
On Booknook.store: https://booknook.store/product/africa-a-continent-on-bended-knees/