Monday, June 21, 2010

The wound that will not heal

Months ago, I read a fascinating article by Ngugi Wa Thion’go on slavery and its effects on the African psyche. Wa Thion’go says that Africans and the West have buried the trauma of slavery in a collective “psychic tomb, acting as if it never happened.” The result is a sense that African lives, ideas and experiences don’t matter – or at least they don’t matter as much.

For instance, the genocide committed against European Jews under Nazi Germany is rightly invoked as a reminder of man’s monstrous inhumanity. Yet, slavery, which Wa Thion’go calls “genocide, holocaust [and] displacement of unprecedented historical and geographic magnitude,” is often dismissed as something we should get over. To invoke it as a possible reason for the economic dominance of the West and the dismal state of the continent and communities in Diaspora is considered in bad taste.

Mr. Wa Thion’go puts it best:

"The economic consequences are obvious: the most developed countries in the West are largely those whose modernity is rooted in the Transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. The African body was a commodity; and manpower, a cheap resource. Note that this was continued in the colonial era where, once again, African human and natural resources were cheap for the colonialist European buyer who determined the price and worth of that which he was buying. Don't we see echoes of that today in the unequal trade practices where the West still determines the price and worth of what it gets from Africa while also determining the price and worth of what it sells to Africa?

"It is not a strange coincidence that the victims of slave trade and slavery on the African continent and abroad are collectively the ones experiencing underdevelopment."

We refuse to see what lies before us. We much prefer the story line that Africa’s leaders are primarily responsible for the continent’s problems with the benevolent West looking helplessly on. While it is true to a great extent, it is not the whole story.

Through slavery and its little sister colonialism, we were stripped of our memories – our history, our religion and our identities. The indigenous solutions that we built for ourselves over millennia of living were destroyed. Many African nations are constantly holding themselves in comparison against an illusionary ideal. Wondering why they cannot seem to enjoy the peace and prosperity of Western nations while forgetting that every aspect of their lives is dominated by an unequal relationship with those nations.

I believe one way to rebuild our identities is through imagination. We are surrounded by thoughtful, intelligent minds dreaming up new ways to be African and new solutions to African problems. Granted, many of them are stifled or driven into exile by corrupt systems built from rusty colonialist models, but those minds do exist. What we need to do is to stop limiting ourselves by drawing arbitrary lines in the sand about what it “Authentically African.”

I find such conversations distracting. They seem to come from a narrow, often Western, interpretation of what it means to be African. Sometimes, I fear that we are spending so much time worrying about whether a work is “African” enough, that we have ceased to write truly innovative fiction. It is not in our best interest to ape the West, scrabbling to create poor copies of technologies we do not understand and cannot effectively use. It is not in our best interest to tell stories circumscribed to fit some narrow definition of what is African – stories designed for the consumption of Western minds. Africa is a very big continent and I believe there is more than enough space in it for all kinds of stories.

We have to gain respect for our own voices, for our own solutions, for the power of our own imaginations. And we must start by acknowledging our past. If we can admit that we were wronged - and that it affects us still - we can see the exploitative web in which we are enmeshed and find ways of untangling ourselves.


  1. got you on a feed. I plan on reading whatever you post as often as I get the chance. Hope Fiction, Hope writing in general is something I love finding. I don't think that's exactly what you're talking about, but finding identity often leads to such things. I'm excited to read more.


  2. I like what I have read so far, and want to say congrats for coming out.

    In my own way, I also want us to tell our stories, please check out Maybe some of our writers will benefit from your editor's eyes. Cheers!

  3. @Brendan, Thank you for the comments. I think writing is all about figuring out who and why you are, so Hope fiction, sci-fi, fantasy - it's all good.

    @Myne, I'll check out, it sounds like a really cool idea. We've got so much talent just bursting out at the seams, it's a shame we don't have all the publishing infrastructure to really support them.

  4. Welcome aboard the blogosphere, for whatever it's worth.

    In re slavery: there was no more powerful example of a society's use of the African Body as commodity than Africa itself. The "West" simply applied precision and accounting to an extant trade.

  5. This is really inspiring.

    James from metallica