Writing Our Own History

You may have read it somewhere that this or that person discovered Mount Kenya. You could also have heard that some man somewhere found an undiscovered lake in the heart of Africa and gave it the name of his Queen back home. You have been taught these things in school and reciting them as taught, enabled you to pass exams and opened up opportunities in life. You have been told these things over and over again until you believed them to be true. I am here to ruin your party and inform you that you have been living a lie.

How, you may ask, is it that what you have known to be true all your life can be wrong? I will answer that question by giving you a small assignment. Try to find out if anybody claims to have “discovered” anything outside Africa. You can for example try to research on who discovered the Swiss Alps, or the River Thames. How about who discovered the Niagara Falls?

A Writing Deficiency

Africa is reputed to have one of the richest oral histories of mankind. However, it is just that; oral! Writing is said to have originated from Africa. It is apparent that not much development has taken place after the origination. This has led to the death or severe mutilation of many African stories. The result of this has been the impression that Africans are primitive and have not come up with much in the improvement of mankind’s lifestyle.

Allergy to Reading

“If you want to hide something from a black person, put it in a book.” This quote by an unidentified speaker has been used repeatedly to depict the ignorance of black people. It is said that they can’t read if their lives depended on it. They are said to only read in preparations for exams and even then, they forget everything as soon as they graduate. Inasmuch as these assertions are unfairly stereotypical, they contain some harsh realities.

It has been illustrated in relation to some crucial documents that people choose not to read even when they contain potentially life-altering information. A case in point is the new Kenyan constitution that we passed in 2010. Some people, during press interviews on the streets, confessed that they had not read a single word of the widely distributed constitution. Instead, they waited for their leaders to read and tell them how to vote.

The Bible – Parallel to Traditional African Religions

It is interesting to note that there are a lot of similarities between Christianity and Indigenous African religions. Of particular interest to me is the creation story. I recently visited the shrine where my community originated from as narrated here; http://thelaymanspoint.blogspot.co.ke/2016/09/tracing-my-roots.html . I listened to the old men talk of how God created our patriarch and placed him there, which is a semblance of the Garden of Eden. 

I was thinking to myself, these two stories developed independently thousands of miles apart, and by people who never knew of the existence of each other, but their similarities are striking. Still in line with religion, it is apparent that both Africa and the East developed elaborate belief systems which the West had to catch up with and adopt. It is also apparent that the only truly Western religion is Atheism.

The Death of African Systems of Government

From most of African history, we learn that the vast majority of communities were self-sufficient. They therefore did not need to interact much with each other apart from the occasional livestock raid when they brought in women for marriage in addition to the animals. However, for the most part, these communities were at peace with each other. It is the West, specifically Europeans, who disrupted this harmonic state of affairs through colonisation and lumping together of diverse communities to form countries. That effectively killed our own forms of small but effective governments.

You might wonder how all our systems died so easily. I believe it is because it was not written down. It was passed through word of mouth from one generation to the next. There was no record of it besides what was committed to a few people’s memory. If anybody died with some form of knowledge that had not been passed on, he died with that knowledge. It is now easy to see why Africa is perceived to be intellectually dark as compared to other continents. We allowed others to write our history. We need to change that and start writing our own history. It is the only way we can revive all the knowledge and wisdom of our forefathers.

P.S. In recent years, it has come to my attention that when people send Christmas wishes, they write X-mass. Even with my limited education, I know that “X” is not an acronym or short form of Christ. If anything, it denotes the cancelling out of something. Does this then mean we are celebrating a mass for Christ to which he is not invited?