NES COMMENTARY No.45
Network of Ethiopian Scholars (NES): May 25, 2019
Title: Celebrate Africa Day to Learn
all of Africa's Positive Contributions to the World!
by Mammo Muchie: DST/NRF SARChI Research Professor, Tshwane
University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa & Chair of the Board of
the Ethiopian Professional Association In Southern Africa (EPASA https://www.ethpasa.org/)
Inspiration
“I have often been accused of pursuing a “policy of the
impossible.” However, I cannot believe in the impossibility of achieving
African union any more than I could ever have thought of the impossibility of
attaining African freedom. Africa must unite. We have before us not only an
opportunity but a historic duty.” ((Nkrumah 1963: 231)
1. Introduction
Every year on May 25, 2019, we have
Africa day celebration. This year on Africa day the new president of South
Africa will be inaugurated who will also be the president of the Africa Union;
so Africa day can either be combined together or be celebrated a day before or
after. South Africa should make both the day and the month the Africa unity and
renaissance education driving time. We have been running the African Unity for
Renaissance series of conferences annually and South African partners have all
been paying for it. This has made us all feel very proud of South Africa for
making tangible Pan-African contributions. We just did the 9th
Africa Unity for Renaissance conference that the SARChI chair was a founding
member continuing to contribute without fail for the last nine years.
As the education system does not value
and include the rich knowledge, struggle and spiritual heritages of Africa, the
Africa Day should open the possibility to become the education and learning
day. How great it will be even beyond the day the full Month of May is
allocated for all Africans to know each other and learn about the rich positive
data, narratives and heritages of Africa. This knowledge that Africa created is
critical to learn in order to change the
mind-set of all Africans. It is time for Africans to know one another,
trust each other and recognise and appreciate the rich knowledge, spiritual and
struggle heritages that our ancestors created and left behind that we have failed
to acknowledge. We should de-colonise the state, the universities
and even the way we value what we manufacture and buy and sell. The Africa day
can provide the opportunity to create the space and platform to exchange how we
can move forward to bring back what has been ignored and excluded to make a big
difference to harvest the rich wealth and resources of Africa to make all
Africans live a sustainable well-being anchored quality of life and decent
existence always and ever without fail. Innovate education, Educate all with
creativity, invention, social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Create
Smart, creative, inventive, innovative, entrepreneurial Africans to liberate
fully Africa with full integration, knowledge and eradication of poverty, unemployment,
inequality and carbon rich diet climate risks in developing united, renascent
and sustainable Africa.
2. Africa Day: Remove the Negative Data to
Bring Back and Value the African Positive Data
Africa has not come out yet from the
over 500 years of negative data based on the pessimism of description as well
as a pessimism of prescription. There is still the condescending and often
violent gaze from diagnosis to destiny about Africa’s past, present and future
with an underlying tone of reproach and even unwelcome condemnation. There is a
need to protest and resist against this negative projection.
Africans need to know where they are going. They must
comprehend the difficult journey of where they come from. What
do Africans see when they look back?' They are often overwhelmed by seeing
mainly the destructive 500 years of the dehumanising African experience. They
rarely acknowledge, appreciate, recognise and promote the positive and
constructive African knowledge heritage and contribution that the African
ancestors created before the period of destruction. The current
education system hardly recognises that this rich knowledge, and science and
technology heritage ever existed. This positive heritage or data should be
included systematically in the curriculum of African schools. It is
disheartening to realise that the demand to change education policy in Africa
often receives a lukewarm reception. The inclusion of the African knowledge
heritage is much needed to design new models that prevent dependence and
encourage creativity and innovation by African learners. The negative narrative
emanating from the destructive period must end. The constructive and positive
heritage must be resurrected and serve to educate and wean generations of
Africans, starting from children from kindergarten and going up to the tertiary
level.
The positive data is much needed to
reject the negative legacy of colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, neo-
colonialism and all the varieties of oppression that continue to affect the
people. The positive data will change Africans from the way they think, to the
way they look and work. African learners need to make a big difference by
becoming Africans with agency, pride, dignity, self-reliance, self-confidence,
freedom and interdependence. The Pan-African education system must capture
critically both the heritages, the re-thinking of narratives and the
future. Ethiopianism, Pan Africanism and African Renaissance, as
three in one together, must provide the foundation and defining meta-narrative
for rethinking, re-designing and re-engineering the completely African
education system. Ways must be found to promote the Pan African education
system across the world without excluding anyone by making sure all are
encouraged, invited and welcomed.
The reason why we must resurrect the
history and knowledge of the positive heritage and data is to learn that the
African past contains rich sources of knowledge that are highly relevant for
today and tomorrow. The rich knowledge exists but we were made not to know it.
It is time to choose like the Africa Day to make all Africans to be exposed to
the knowledge, struggle and spiritual heritages created in Africa and by
Africans for all to grow up with learning always systematically without fail.
This can indeed be achieved by consistently putting all of them
together in the curriculum.
When past generations went to school,
they never learned the following remarkable facts about Africa. Even today, we
ask, who in Africa knows that Africa is the origin of humanity? Who knows that
Africa has made discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, science and technology?
Who knows that Africa is also the origin of universities? It is not me but
astronomers and engineers from Western research universities that have
acknowledged evidence that in many major inventions, Africans have made
documented contributions.
Carbon steel was made 2,000 years
ago in Tanzania: astronomical observations by the Dogons in Mali have been
acknowledged by those scholars such as Carl Sagan of Cornel University:
language, mathematical systems, architecture, agriculture, cattle rearing,
navigation of inland waterways and open seas, medicine and communication,
writing systems- in all these fields Africans have been inventors. The negative
narrative that Africans have not been inventors must be rejected. There were
also African fractals in West and Central Africa that have been demonstrated by
repeating geometric patterns on various scales that have been used in textiles,
paintings, sculpture, cosmologies, architecture, town planning. Today fractals
are the basis of the World Wide Web. In Ethiopia, the mathematics that applies
binary logic has been used for both computation and Meta physics. The Ethiopian
method of mathematical calculation was released publicly by BBC4 with
commentary by scholars from UK's Open University. This ancient mathematics from
Ethiopia demonstrated that Africans used binary logic of mathematical
calculation, which is similar to what is behind today's internet explorer and
other computer -based systems.
African knowledge in agriculture
is rich as this has been recognised and acknowledged fully by the US Academy of
Science in 1996. The academy agrees that Africa has more native cereals than
any other continent, has its own species of rice, as well as finger millet, and
several dozen wild cereals whose grains are eaten. This is a food heritage that
has fed people for generations, possibly stretching back to the origins of
humankind.
Africa had a rich past before the
destruction and the dehumanisation of Africans. It is high time that the
positive data from the past is resurrected. The more Africans learn to unite
and stand up together, the more there will be the opportunity for Africans to
resurrect the positive data for undertaking and performing in the 21st
century the constructive Pan-African transformation. Africa must reject
epistemological marginalisation and overcome strongly the Africa failure
narrative and dwelling on the negative data. It is important to recognise that
Africans can be able to do so only if they are to re-engineer the entire
education system by promoting Ethiopianism, Pan Africanism and African
renaissance as three into one, and African unity expressed with the three foundations.
Success of uniting the three into one will make a big difference. Then the
Africa that the imperial- colonial builders rejected will become the
cornerstone of the arch for creating a humane and civilised livelihood for all not
only Africa but also the rest of the world.
3. The Pan African Contribution from South Africa
Who knows that the first 1900
Pan-African Conference was not only organised by Henry Sylvester Williams but
also by a South African female Pan-African activist Anne Victoria Kinloch? She
was the co-founder with Sylvester Williams of the African Association that
organised the first Pan-African Congress in 1900, but she is not included in
all the narratives.
Who also knows that in 1906 Pixley ka
Isaka Seme from South Africa initiated the African renaissance by writing a
book on regeneration of Africa. He was also one of the earliest Africans to do
his degree in an Ivy league university in New York City at Columbia University
making major contributions to inspire Africans in America. Azikiwe from Nigeria
wrote the book renascent Africa in 1937.Cheikh Anta Diop did his in 1966. The earlier
contributions, however, all came from South Africa.
The end of apartheid also brought the Thabo
Mbeki contributions to make Africa fully renascent. In fact, the most
significant positive development for Africa after the end of the cold war is
the emergence of South Africa from its apartheid era exclusion and isolation.
Post–apartheid South Africa should have been the South Africa with the rest of
Africa and conversely the rest of Africa also united fully with South Africa.
The reason for this much needed closer integration is to strengthen both South
Africa and the rest of Africa by combining all the needed energy to liberate
Africa entirely from all the dangers of the colonial onslaught that has not
been fully removed.
South Africa very much needs the rest
of Africa to avoid being pushed aside itself from the harsh competition in the
current fourth industrial revolution of the global economy. The strength of the
South African economy making with the rest of Africa beneficial connections would
help to insulate the weaker African economies by providing an alternative to
the challenges of the African states facing the unequal lack of benefits from
the current global economy. The relationship between South Africa and the rest
of Africa can be mutually beneficial if both sides develop a Pan-African
outlook, perspective and shared goal and interests.
The problem is thus twofold: First,
South Africa has to evolve a Pan-African perspective from the debris of its
apartheid past involving all sections of its communities. Second, the rest of
Africa should be able to recognise the benefits and values in making the South
African connection an important prod to enter the world economy on terms, for a
change, not dictated against Africa’s best interests. Thus if South Africa
evolves a clear Africa role, opportunities exist to adding new energy and
vitality to conversations regarding the revival and renewal of African unity.
Something like a second edition of Pan African ideals, potentialities and
projections under the changed circumstances of the time can be fostered. This
will open the opportunities for South Africa and its leaders to utilize their
hard-earned reputation to repair Africa’s fractured identity, unity, future and
destiny.
4.
Conflicts
multiply in defending borders left from the scramble for Africa time of divide
and rule
The borders are drawn cynically by
outsiders in all parts of Africa. Families have even been divided and tribalism
promoted to make divide and rule successful to benefit external actors. Why do
Africans fight each other to protect borders others cynically drew to divide
even families? The divide and rule divisive plot has plagued Africa with so
many conflicts and wars. Africans should have united and rejected the borders.
There is a need to make an agreement
where no African must lose life to defend borders that others drew to serve
their interest and not to benefit Africans. There must be full agreement never
to fight one another to defend such borders. If the U.S.A. has the whole world
in one state, why do we Africans fail to unite? China is united. India is
united. Europe is united. Where is Africa now? We have the Africa Union, but we
are not still united yet. Time to accelerate this unity. South Africa should
help this unity process. Let South Africa herself also become South of Africa;
then it can give big lessons for other Africans to follow up to do the same!
They all must put Africa first and recognise they are all have been shaped with
colonial mistakes.
Trade, mobility and currency
still are big challenges to promote African sustainable, smart, innovative and
sustainable development. The existing states in the Africa Union have not all
agreed to sign the continental free trade zone. Africans still have not agreed
to learn and speak the language the Africa Union has selected. Africa has its
own alphabet, its own calendar and even long before the European enlightenment,
there was the African enlightenment acknowledged by Western scholars.
The African Union has not removed yet
Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Levantine Phone classifications. All
Africans should agree to speak at least a few languages. There must be an
agreement by all which languages to choose. Africa has an ancient Ge’ez
alphabet and even a calendar system now still exists in current Ethiopia. These
were created when ancient Ethiopia had the name Africa. Why not learn to use
our own African alphabet, numbering system and calendar? Why stay locked in
speaking colonial languages. We acknowledge and use our own languages and can
also a shared few foreign languages. We can use the current digital on line training
to make all of us learn the African languages. We can enrich and develop the
selected and chosen languages. Africa is not a phone. Africa is philia (love).
Africa’s spiritual heritage with values
of Ubuntu can save not only Africa but also the world. Africa has the richest
philosophy that will save the world.
The struggle heritage should be valued.
Africans from all over have struggled from the time of slavery. They have won
major anti-colonial battles from Haiti, South Africa, Ethiopia and battled
always to resist all over the world.
5.
The
Struggle Heritage:125 Years of Adwa African Victory: Celebrate with Statues in
the Africana World for the Leaders that Deserve
The great African Adwa victory will be
celebrated as the 125 years in 2021. The 120 years’ celebration was done all
over the world. In South Africa, former president brother Thabo Mbeki gave a
well-researched and powerful presentation. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=624BaD6wKIQ). The opportunity to celebrate the 125
years by erecting statues for the African leaders like Aste Menelik and Etigue
Taitu in the different regions of Africa exists. It will be good as
Ethiopianism was powerfully promoted in Southern Africa and after the 1896 Adwa
Great African Victory, there was the second Ethiopia Manifesto, the erection of
statues in Southern Africa should be accepted by the Government of South
Africa. It will be exemplary to do it in order to promote the Pan-African
and African unity for renaissance objective that all Africans must realise
without fail. Africa Day and Africa Month should deliver tangible outputs.
6.
Time
to Make African People own Africa: Set Up the African Sovereign Wealth Fund
Africa still loses every year billions
with more than six times her resources taken away. All Africans must own rich
Africa; not others should own Africa’s rich resources and wealth as it has been
always and has not ended. Ways must be found how to make all the people of
Africa are enabled to own Africa’s rich resources. Norway created the sovereign
wealth fund when it discovered oil in 1996 by making the people own the
resources, not the states or private companies. Africa is super rich, if the
people own Africa’s resources, they will all have their social well- being
secured.
The solar energy even the Sahara can
also provide free electricity for all of Africa by making at the same time the
Sahara Deseret a green zone. We have the African Solar Energy network that is
trying to promote this important project (www.ansole.org). The Sahara should unite Africa. It
should not divide Africans. I was recently in Tunisia and shared this message.
The African Union has not removed yet Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone and
Levantine Phone classifications.
All Africans should agree to speak at
least a few languages. There must be an agreement. Africa has an ancient Ge’ez
alphabet and even a calendar system now still exists in current Ethiopia. These
were created when ancient Ethiopia had the name Africa. Why not learn to use
our own African alphabet, numbering system and calendar. The language selected
Kiswahili should use the Ge’ez alphabet that a Swedish professor said is much
better than the Roman/Latin alphabet. Why stay locked in speaking colonial
languages.
Africa’s spiritual heritage with values
of Ubuntu can save not only Africa but also the world. The spiritual heritage
in Africa should also bring back all the rich values, traditions and indigenous
knowledge. I recently visited the Hayk Estfanos Monastery that created so much
knowledge about astronomy and all other physical and natural spheres of life.
The knowledge is very rich but it is not accessible. Ways must be discovered to
share the rich knowledge that combines spirituality with the natural world.
We should do all we can to also
value our belief systems and traditions instead of copying mission churches
that played a big role in promoting colonialism. Let our spiritual heritage be
valued as our knowledge and struggle heritages. Together they will make Africa
radiate moral, intellectual, and economic and political intelligence that will
not only make Africa great but also the rest of Africa and the world.
7.
Concluding
Remarks
Africans need to come together and know
each other and remove all the negative obstructions that distract the African unity
and renaissance vision, mission and project identity. Time for all Africans
to see and recognise themselves first as African human
citizens and fast –track to create the one Africa nation. Now, Now, Now! No
more delay. Unity should have been done yesterday and the day before yesterday already;
but we should all work very hard to do it with no further postponement and make our
people own Africa and create leadership qualities that serve rather than
that steal; governance, institutions
and systems that we all value and learn to agree even if we
disagree to discover and find a way to re-agree. If
we Africans value Africa we should all be humble, honest, sincere and
with integrity shape the future destiny of the rich Africa to stop forever
and always to make the people poor. Let rich Africa make the people of Africa
rich and let us transform, reform and perform to make sure we are out of the
current paradox of having rich Africa with its resources flowing out while the
people are poor. Let the betrayal of Africa by all who have been doing it for
so long stop forever.
Decolonizing Africa should have been
fully achieved with unity, freedom and liberation. Neo-colonialism, aid, loan
and debt dependency continue with huge resource flight from Africa.
Time to liberate Africa by making Africans to unite and own Africa now to go
beyond all these unending dangers haunting rich Africa not enabled to change
the poverty, inequality and unemployment of the people. It is unity and
liberation time now. Let the Africa Day and Month highlight these liberation
and unity values for all. Time now to unite and make Africa renascent without
fail and use Africa Day to spread and share this important message to all in
the world. Let Africa unite, regenerate and be renascent.
8.
References
11.http://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/mammo-muchie(89262108-15d6-4a1f-bb4e-65872bf5f912)/publications.html
. file:///C:/Users/Mamo%20Muchie/Downloads/mammo_muchie%20(3).pdf
...
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