NEO-IMPERIALISM IN AFRIKA
Afrikan youths in the hands of social media imperialists
Until recently, even though I have been part of Msingi Afrika Magazine from the onset, and have written more articles than I can remember about Afrika, I had not looked deeper into the issues of imperialism, colonialism and the neo-colonialism that we are facing right now in Afrika and the many reasons why it appears in real time that whenever a person or a group of persons rise up in Afrika to question the status quo, especially in regards to the machinations of the Global West, they are eliminated. It has been the case from the inception of the intrusion into Afrika by foreign powers. It happened with Patrice Lumumba of DRC, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (removed from office), Samora Machel of Mozambique and the list continues. So, recently, I started reading books about the lives of the various Afrikan leaders that the dirty and bloody hands of the Imperialist West and their Afrikan cohorts took out, either by physical assassination, political assassination or other forms of assassination and found one thing in common with all their stories. They stood for the liberation of their people, took a stand for revolution against imperialism but were “stopped” by the imperialists using the very dirty and bloody hands of the Afrikans closest to them. The question is, what is it about dis-loyalty to a common goal among Afrikans and why is it very easy to sell out the common goal for self-glorification and unholy desires? It beats my mind, to say the least.
Colonialism versus Coloniality
I look around me at the various things going on in our beautiful Afrika; how the tag third-world, poorest continent, backward people etc., is still the tag and identity attached to the Afrikan people even in the midst of so much wealth. And it breaks my heart to know that, even though we could have done better, we just don’t – irrespective of whatever reasons we may give as individuals or as a people. The situation also brings one to a basic question, that is, is colonialism and imperialism still here with us? The answer is, absolutely they are, except that they are using a more covert system of enticement and attraction to the table of greed and fame, first with some of our compromising leaders, and now with our young Afrikans. Meaning that while the pre-colonial Imperialist West penetrated Afrika using the Berlin conference’s DIVIDE AND CONQUER technique, the post-colonial Imperialist West are now using the UNITE AND CONQUER technique to bring those who are already compromised in their hearts to their table of greed and by that they become puppets in the hands of the imperialists. They are very much aware that once an Afrikan leader is caught pants down eating from that table, in form of debts and the other personal gains they make from the imperialists, their people and the natural resources back home become the sacrificial lambs that keep the wheel of global domination going. This is the worst part of the entire narrative of imperialism and colonialism in Afrika, because it makes a fool of the intelligence of the Afrikan people, by simply exchanging colonialism (the act of physically putting a sovereign people under another country’s power) for coloniality, which is about covertly infusing systemic colonialism in the culture, arts, tradition, family life, creativity, creation of knowledge and its storage etc., of a people; making the supposed free and independent people see themselves only from the eyes of their former colonial masters and by that, they are kept in mental slavery.
Maldonado-Torres puts the difference between coloniality and colonialism in this way:
Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day.
The danger of young Afrikans with compromised hearts
There is an old saying that says “show me your friends and I will show you who you are”. It appears correct that a person can be known by the kind of friends they keep until you encounter just how easy it is for friends to betray the very trust found in their friendships, for the sake of personal gains and desires. That’s when you will know that two people are friends does not necessarily mean they have the same priorities and ideology and thus “you cannot accurately tell who a person is by just looking at their friend or friends”. Instead, I would prefer to say “show me your heart and the desires in it, then I will show you who you are”. True men are known for their hearts and not their friends.
Right now, as you may or may not agree, there is a deadly tool of imperialism, colonialism and colonialist agenda in the hands of our young Afrikan people, which has taken over an entire generation of our so-called future leaders. That tool is, SOCIAL MEDIA. It has clearly become the most active tool for identity creation, mis-creation, manipulation, propaganda and distribution of the same, to the extent that whatever the agenda of the imperialists in Afrika is, it can be distributed without much hassle by the friendly hands of our young people, either knowingly or unknowingly. And come to know that the most profitable venture right now in a pandemic season is the sector of content creation, our youths are not leaving any stones unturned in the quest for the ‘green pastures’ found in their devices irrespective of what it is costing the Afrikan community and how it’s putting hindrances in the quest for true revolution that can engineer real emancipation. There has never been a generation in Afrika that is more gullible to the machinations of the imperialist, than the one we have right now. And it’s not because they are ignorant or uneducated, but because they are knowledgeable and educated in the modern day technology, tainted by a twisted ideology about what it means to be Afrikan coupled with hearts that are open to do to anything to make money. It’s like having the power of technology in the hands of young people without clear cut goals and visions for the emancipation of Afrika, so, every time the imperialist companies and corporations come knocking at their doors, they easily open. So, we have a large collection of young and learned Afrikans with no antecedent of where we are coming from as Afrikans, no clear cut vision for Afrika, which they can use their skills for and thus, they are easy targets by the global imperialists to create an army of tech savvy young Afrikans, who are complicit in destroying their own people.
Take for instance, we had an issue with YouTube a while back in which one of the videos we shared on our channel was considered to go against the YouTube community guidelines, so it was taken down just as we uploaded it. What they considered against their community guidelines was actually that we posted an Afrikan remedy for Covid-19. Think about this.
We shared the experience with a friend who is in charge of a much bigger YouTube channel and his response was very telling of how much this generation of young Afrikans have been compromised due to the quest for money. He told us in an I-really-don’t-care way that if we want to make money out of our YouTube channel, we must follow their rules or be taken down if it’s revolution we want to create. In other words, he was saying, you cannot go against the rules set down by the tools of the imperialists if you want to make money from them and also that the reason why his own channel will never upload videos that go against the imperialist’s ideas is because they don’t want the flow of YouTube money to stop. I am talking about a channel that has almost a million subscribers. If you are a content creator reading this article, I am pretty sure you are aware of the strict censorship of content going on in some of the most popular social media platforms. But have you asked yourself why that is? Or are you naive to think and believe it’s because they care about mis-information? Or do you maybe know the truth, that they are actually censoring true information while pushing mis-information?
Why is it important to take a critical look at this trend going on among our youths? First, to not to look at it now is to sentence the future of Afrika to some unavoidable destruction. Because, if what drives the content creation of Afrikan youths is making money and the other things that come with it like fame, popularity, subscriptions, likes etc., then where will the future leaders who will uphold the true uncompromised Afrikan narrative and ideals come from?
Secondly, if it is true that he who pays the piper dictates the tune of the music, do we not already have a problem on our hands, since the “tunes of the Afrikan music” are already beeing dictated by those who paid for it? And does that not show you how difficult it will be to make a revolutionary move against the imperialist agendas of foreign powers in Afrika? Does it not show that the wealth of Afrika will continue to be pillaged by foreign powers, especially now that there is a common trend in which young Afrikans build software and new technologies, but go ahead to sell them to rich tech companies in the many silicon valleys of this world? Is that not the future of Afrika that is being sold for immediate gratification?
We all know that when such technologies are sold for, let’s say 1million dollars, in two years’ time, that same software in the hands of the new owners will likely be generating millions upon millions, if not billions of dollars. Not to talk of the brain drain that is also going on right now. A situation where the brightest and most promising of Afrikan youths are given scholarships to go study abroad or innovators or sportsmen and women are given jobs overseas. You know what happens. They don’t return to Afrika and when they do, they just become another mole in the globalist payroll to steal from Afrika all over again.
And mind you, I am not saying that all Afrikan youths that are into social media content creation do it from the place of compromise or for money, I am just saying that most of the thoughts behind their creativity are rooted in wanting to make money. Would you blame them? Not really. Especially in this age where the rate of unemployment is skyrocketing. Social media content creation simply made a “legal and clean way” for them to be engaged, making a living while at it. However, the danger of making legal money through social media, while consciously or unconsciously aligned with a global covert SOCIAL MEDIA IMPERIALIST AGENDA is what we have to watch out for. The false pandemic has shown a lot of things that had been going on underground, especially with the social media platforms. For if you ask yourself why social media, which was supposed to be a place where people get accurate information and daily help when needed, suddenly become like a policing agency for global domination agendas, you will see and then know why it is dangerous for our youths not to understand the tools in their hands.
Meaning that, young people, especially the ones with a big following on social media, no longer even understand what it means to have a revolutionary mind, talk less of using their platforms to correct the many ills and evils in our society. Just because they want to make money. It’s even more interesting that it’s these same young Afrikans that like to call Afrika backward. But it’s hypocritical at best because you cannot hold in your right hand the chicken and chips of the imperialist, while pointing the left hand of accusation to the globalist for making Afrika poor or backward.
We must train our kids about Afrikanism
The concept of Afrikanism or Africanism is not in any way saying that nothing or no one else exists outside of the Afrikan people or that whatever is not Afrikan should not be looked at in good light. Not at all. It’s not even a concept that tries to put Afrika first. It’s more of a concept that says that as an Afrikan, there are cultural realities that drive how we live and relate with ourselves and the world. It’s like how Arvie Ngalangala puts it in his article about the true culture of the Afrikan, which he calls the culture of the Light of God the Father. It’s about the beauty that emanates from the heart that is steeped in the cultural reality of the Afrikan Ubuntu which says “I am because you are”. This Afrikan way of life is definitely what the Imperial West, with their capitalism and individualism, cannot understand nor will they ever allow to thrive. Why? It will instantly put a halt to the stealing, pillaging and control of the Afrikan natural resources. In other words, keep the Afrikan youths busy with social media gains of money and fame, make them undermine the Afrikan narrative through the concept of coloniality which makes them see what is foreign as superior and what is Afrikan as inferior and you will have an army of young Afrikans who are ready to sell their father’s graves to partake of western delicacies, even at the expense of the Afrikan future.
Save our youths
We definitely need to re-orientate our young people about the need to live uprightly and justly. We cannot have nor can we bear the present and future devastating effects of a generation of young people who are only controlled and moved around by money, its acquisition and lavish spending on frivolities that amounts to nothing. Am I against making money from social media? Not at all. It’s mostly legal money. Another question is, are our young people aware that social media platforms, even with all the “good” that they can be used for, are also tools for manipulation of data to create and push narratives that are undermining of the Afrikan people? Moreso, how many of these platforms do we own as Afrikans? How many of these platforms do we have direct control over? Are we using these platforms to create a new narrative for the Afrikan people or are we just dancing to the tunes of those who want to keep us as slaves because they pay the piper?
It is evident that Afrikan governments and leaders have neglected the youth in Afrika and not only neglected them but actually pushed them out of the way in order to retain jobs and power that they promised were the preserve of the youth. But, in doing so, what they did was create a generation of people who know they have been rejected by the system that is meant to look out for them, counsel them and groom them as responsible citizens to be able to create a whole new narrative for Afrika’s future. We all know that Afrikan governments and leaders have done this because they do not have a plan for their countries as a whole, for their citizens, and in particular, for the next generation of Afrikans who are meant to step up and take responsibility for leading Afrika into the future. We know this because we have seen their failure in every sector in Afrika for over 60 years and we have seen the selfish and greedy choices that they have made and we have seen them drink from the table of the Whores of the IMF, the World Bank, the IFC, the UN, the WHO and the rest of the Imperialist West, taking their policy choices and strategic directions verbatim to implement in Afrika as though Afrikans were unable to make their own decisions for themselves.
So, the feeling of loss and lack of direction that the youth have right now is perfectly understandable, because it afflicts not just them but entire generations of Afrikans who have been subject to blind and groping leadership from a fearful ruling class that seeks to entreaty those whose wine and food they cannot do without because of their rotten compromise. And because they literally have no clue how to function without them – a sad and tragic truth that they refuse to face.
But the youth can and must do better than their forbears. They have to challenge themselves to go beyond the limited thinking and vision of those leaders who chose to fatten and enrich themselves on the oppression of the colonizers. It is the distinct and obvious desire of the imperialists to create in Afrika a majority generation of young people who are completely enamored with the modern ‘mirror and cloth’ of social media and what the West has to offer, to the extent that in mindset – if not appearance – they have a new breed and generation of slaves who will do their bidding no matter the cost to the minority of free thinkers or the generations to come.
So, to the young people, I say, do not go willingly under the hypnotic spell that they have woven for generations. Be the ones who see it for what it is and fight with everything that you can to resist their witchcraft and sorcery. Because, if you don’t, Afrika will be totally erased in mindset, even though the physical space will remain. Always remember this: they are after your mind and heart. Don’t give it to them!
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