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Africa's Identity Dilemma And the Black Exodus to the West
- By News Hound
- Published 09/16/2007
- African Diaspora
- Unrated
News Hound
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View all articles by News HoundAfrica's Identity Dilemma And the Black Exodus to the West
By Timothy Kalyegira
Last week, although this column focused on the breakdown of order in eastern DR Congo, this is a general pattern unfolding across much of Africa. As we watch these countries head toward collapse, there is a rise in migration to the West of Africa's best-educated lot and thousands of other semi-skilled young people.
We are granted political asylum there. Ousted African heads of state or persecuted opposition leaders often find refuge in the American, British, or French embassy in their capitals.
A degree or diploma earned from a western college or university has replaced degrees from national universities as the most important point of academic reference.
The Western Union and MoneyGram money wire transfer services in African towns and cities have become vital supply routes back home from the West.
Many families in Africa are kept afloat or even alive by family members based in Europe, North America, or Australia. The Washington Post newspaper reported on January 20, 2006 that, "It is estimated that some 40 per cent of Africa's private wealth is held overseas."
The Western world has become, in a concrete sense, our real home. The Black American entertainment magazine Jet - sister to Ebony and part of the Johnson Publishing Company- reported on July 23, 2007: "Over the past decade, the African immigrant population has more than tripled in major cities across the United States-now more than a million- with the greatest concentration in East coast areas such as New York, greater Washington D.C., Maryland and the Virginia suburbs, census data reveals.
In Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis, Africans now constitute more than 15 percent of the Black population. Census figures from 2000 show 43 percent of Africans in the U.S. have college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana are the countries of origin for most émigrés, but the influx is increasingly diverse."
Last year, after reading a few books on the history of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and one on the CIA, America's foreign intelligence agency, I asked a former bodyguard of President Milton Obote: knowing what we now know about Mossad and the CIA, how could we have imagined that we were ready for independence?
The whole range of technical and analytical sophistication that is required for counter-intelligence work simply does not exist in Africa. Our intelligence agencies should more properly be defined as secret police.
If western embassies in our countries routinely intercept top-secret phone, email, and fax communication both from State House and our intelligence headquarters, what kind of national security can we claim to have?
Do we even know how we arrived at what we do? Why, for instance, do we have an education system that starts from P.1 to P.7? Why not P.1 to P.5 or P.1 to P. 10?
To study law at university, the preferred A-Level subjects are literature, economics and history! How did we arrive at those three? Why not English, history and secretarial studies, since lawyers work heavily with case histories, careful documentation and argument?
Why is the Speaker of Parliament third in line of succession to the President? Why not the army commander, since, anyway, that is the trend our history after independence has taken?
Why do we work five days a week, Monday to Friday? Why not four, Monday until Thursday? Why does work in public offices typically start from 8a.m. to 5p.m.? Why not 10:00a.m. to 7:00 p.m.?
Is there anyone who can explain how we arrived at this? It is agreed in all African countries today that we should strive for greater unity, open markets, and if possible, political federation, hence the formation of OAU in 1963 and the African Union in 2001.
However, if political unity and common economic markets are so crucial to our development, how did White apartheid South Africa- isolated from the rest of the continent- become such an economic power in a way that this talk of ECOWAS, East African Community, SADC, IGAD, and COMESA have failed to achieve all these decades?
If we argue that mass education is important for African countries to develop, how did apartheid South Africa keep millions of the Black majority illiterate or semi-educated yet still become Africa's richest economy? It seems that with or without us, economic development is still possible.
How did we get to this point of being a people whose very being is to be rooted elsewhere in mind, action, desires, and decisions? After all, didn't we agitate and even fight for independence in the 1950s, confident that, once left to ourselves we would develop, be proud and strong?
We came to this because we did not dedicate ourselves to something called thinking. Do we have the effort, the planning, the resources required for us to become strong, to find our feet in this modern world dominated by the Whites?
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709150139.html
Last week, although this column focused on the breakdown of order in eastern DR Congo, this is a general pattern unfolding across much of Africa. As we watch these countries head toward collapse, there is a rise in migration to the West of Africa's best-educated lot and thousands of other semi-skilled young people.
We are granted political asylum there. Ousted African heads of state or persecuted opposition leaders often find refuge in the American, British, or French embassy in their capitals.
A degree or diploma earned from a western college or university has replaced degrees from national universities as the most important point of academic reference.
The Western Union and MoneyGram money wire transfer services in African towns and cities have become vital supply routes back home from the West.
Many families in Africa are kept afloat or even alive by family members based in Europe, North America, or Australia. The Washington Post newspaper reported on January 20, 2006 that, "It is estimated that some 40 per cent of Africa's private wealth is held overseas."
The Western world has become, in a concrete sense, our real home. The Black American entertainment magazine Jet - sister to Ebony and part of the Johnson Publishing Company- reported on July 23, 2007: "Over the past decade, the African immigrant population has more than tripled in major cities across the United States-now more than a million- with the greatest concentration in East coast areas such as New York, greater Washington D.C., Maryland and the Virginia suburbs, census data reveals.
In Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis, Africans now constitute more than 15 percent of the Black population. Census figures from 2000 show 43 percent of Africans in the U.S. have college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana are the countries of origin for most émigrés, but the influx is increasingly diverse."
Last year, after reading a few books on the history of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and one on the CIA, America's foreign intelligence agency, I asked a former bodyguard of President Milton Obote: knowing what we now know about Mossad and the CIA, how could we have imagined that we were ready for independence?
The whole range of technical and analytical sophistication that is required for counter-intelligence work simply does not exist in Africa. Our intelligence agencies should more properly be defined as secret police.
If western embassies in our countries routinely intercept top-secret phone, email, and fax communication both from State House and our intelligence headquarters, what kind of national security can we claim to have?
Do we even know how we arrived at what we do? Why, for instance, do we have an education system that starts from P.1 to P.7? Why not P.1 to P.5 or P.1 to P. 10?
To study law at university, the preferred A-Level subjects are literature, economics and history! How did we arrive at those three? Why not English, history and secretarial studies, since lawyers work heavily with case histories, careful documentation and argument?
Why is the Speaker of Parliament third in line of succession to the President? Why not the army commander, since, anyway, that is the trend our history after independence has taken?
Why do we work five days a week, Monday to Friday? Why not four, Monday until Thursday? Why does work in public offices typically start from 8a.m. to 5p.m.? Why not 10:00a.m. to 7:00 p.m.?
Is there anyone who can explain how we arrived at this? It is agreed in all African countries today that we should strive for greater unity, open markets, and if possible, political federation, hence the formation of OAU in 1963 and the African Union in 2001.
However, if political unity and common economic markets are so crucial to our development, how did White apartheid South Africa- isolated from the rest of the continent- become such an economic power in a way that this talk of ECOWAS, East African Community, SADC, IGAD, and COMESA have failed to achieve all these decades?
If we argue that mass education is important for African countries to develop, how did apartheid South Africa keep millions of the Black majority illiterate or semi-educated yet still become Africa's richest economy? It seems that with or without us, economic development is still possible.
How did we get to this point of being a people whose very being is to be rooted elsewhere in mind, action, desires, and decisions? After all, didn't we agitate and even fight for independence in the 1950s, confident that, once left to ourselves we would develop, be proud and strong?
We came to this because we did not dedicate ourselves to something called thinking. Do we have the effort, the planning, the resources required for us to become strong, to find our feet in this modern world dominated by the Whites?
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709150139.html
