How European Colonialists Africanized, De-Africanized, and De-indigenised Africa

Those who have read African history possibly know this. A story is told that when European aliens first came to Africa, their biggest fear was that native Africans were going to eat them. Correspondingly, native Africans on the other hand also had deeply seated fears that the white man had come to have them for a delicious meal. In consequence, during the early African colonial configuration, the only thing that natives Africans and European aliens shared was ‘cannibal-phobia’ – fear to be eaten.

On the one hand cannibal-phobia did not disrupt European Aliens from Africanizing, de-indigenising and de-Africanising Africa.  On the other, fear to be enjoyed as a meal did not stop native Africans from surrendering to European conquest and manipulation.

Before the coming of Europeans to sub-Saharan Africa, natives did not have any idea that they were black, African. They had developed their intra-ethnic identities and interaction based on tribal and clan similarities and differences.

It after the European explorers made physical contact with black Africa that native Africans recognized that they were a people of different race – black people. The idea of being black as a form of identity only crawled into their lifestyle when they encountered European colonialists. At this point, the natives, regardless of their ethnic, clan and sub-clan identities noticed that they all had something in common - skin colour. This interaction between the Europeans and natives Africans gave birth to black identity.

Did native Africans know that they inhabited a continent called Africa? Did they know that the land they inhabited was a continent surrounded by other continents? Tracing the origin of the name ‘Africa’, Ali Mazrui has noted that:

“As for the name Africa, some have traced it to Berber origins; others have traced it to Greco-Roman ancestry. The ancient Romans referred to their colonial province to the present-day Tunisia and eastern Algeria as ‘Africa’, possibly because the name came from a Latin or Greek word for that region or its people, or perhaps because the word came from one of the local languages, either Berber or Phoenician. Did the Romans call the continent after the Latin word Aprica (sunny)? Or were the Romans and Greeks using the Greek word Aphrike (without cold)? Or did the word come from the Semites to refer to a very productive region of what is today Tunisia – a name which meant ears of Corn?”

Although the name Africa may have its roots in Semite or Greco-Roman civilization, its application and entrenchment was very pronounced during European colonialism. As Mazrui further posits, “in the fifteenth century western Europeans first journeyed to Black Africa, south of the Sahara, and began to apply the old Roman term….. This process of discovery of Black Africa led Western Europeans to think of Africa as the land of Black people, as the ‘Dark Continent’ - no longer as a North African province”. According to western European colonialists, black became a human race – Africans, and Africa became the Dark Continent.

Furthermore, the cartographic work of Gerhard Mercator was a continuation of European Africanisation of Africa. It is Mercator’s cartographic work that placed Africa where it is on the world map – in the southern hemisphere or below the continent of Europe.  Should we take it that Mercator was right with his cartographic work? Mercator’s theory about the geographical and continental configuration cannot go unchallenged for it does not change anything if I turn the world map the other side up and make Europe lie below Africa.

The road to de-indigenization of Africa

The entire colonial experience was exaggeratedly dominated by episodes of de-indiginisation and de-africanization of native Africans. European aliens Africanized Africa as much as they de-indigenized her. De-indigenization took different forms: coercion, imposition, manipulation, and indoctrination. By introducing Christianity, European aliens captured the faith of native Africans. Christianity prepared the mind of Africans for European conquest. Nobody captures this other than Jommo Kenyata, the first president of Kenya, when he elegantly put it, "When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, we had the Bible in our hand, and they had the land." Through Western education, the intellect of African indigenes was captured. European Christianity demonized African culture (music, dance, folklore, theology). European education dismantled indigenous knowledge, value and support systems. The quest to de-indigenize African was fully underway.

European aliens Africanized Africa as soon as they set their foot on the African continent and de-africanized Africa later after their stay. Unquestionably, the icing sugar put on the de-Africanization and de-indigenisation cake was the balkanization of the African continent into counterfeit artificial states that did not respect the tribal diversities and boundaries of African communities. Berlin was the centre for this historical drama, with Europeans colonialists as the key actors. The scramble and partition of Africa was in full gear. This time, native Africans were categorized into Ugandans, Kenyans, Congolese, Nigerians, among others. Slowly, Africans ceased to see themselves as Africans. They took pride in their newly formed nation states. By accepting membership into these imagined communities, Africans fell prey of the de-Africanization trap.

The worst form of de-indigenisation was slave trade. The slave ship commoditized the Africans. Slave trade dehumanized Africa, on the one hand and enriched Western industrial civilization, on the other. This became the worst form of human mortification and degradation ever to happen in human history. As European slave merchants were smiling all their way into the Atlantics, African slaves were agonizingly and diffidently bidding farewell to their ancestral habitat, never to bond yet again with their ancestral history.   Again, the colonial masters were the key investors in what Ali Mazrui refers to as “commerce of human merchandise.”

African colonization and the emergence of the gun culture are very much intertwined. The colonial masters introduced the gun to the African continent. The gun was used to mobilize resources, and was exchanged for raw materials from Africa. Resources from Africa, which flocked Europe stimulated economic production. The guns that flooded Africa from Europe facilitated human destruction. Animals were also culprits of this European tomfoolery; elephants were killed in immeasurable number to get Ivory to tame European hunger for economic production and progression. As Europe matched to economic glory Africa was left swinging between an abyss of tyranny and a very deep ocean of anarchy.  A colonial sin was committed, African succeeding generations are still serving the punishment.

Part of the epic theory of scramble and partition of Africa are the names the colonial masters gave to the newly created nation-states in Africa. How African are these names? Do these names reflect the identity of people that inhabit the different fraudulent geographic territories of the continent that colonialists created? The answer is in the negative. Some names like Kenya and Tanzania speak more to the geographic and physical features (Mount Kenya and Tanganyika plains respectively) as opposed to the cultural identity of ethnicities in these territories. South Africa on the other hand is a mere geographic expression-a country located in the southern part of Africa. Ivory Coast was named after its wealth in Ivory, which was a lucrative commodity for European merchants. Naming of Africa’s nation states took another form of de-africanization.

Europe’s de-Africanization of Africa is discernible in the books of African history. European colonialists were determined to distort history, remake history and own this history. For example, early European explorers claimed discovery of geographical features, places and monuments in Africa. In Uganda, we are told that John Speke was the first man to discover the source of river Nile. This is just a pie in air. It is tolerable and fitting to say that the Basoga people, who live around the source of river Nile, had seen the source of the river before Speke came to Africa.

Africa cannot completely revert back to her pre-colonial starting point but there is a possibility for at least partial reversal. De-Africanized Africa can be re-Africanized and re-indigenized. The journey to re-africanization and re-indigenization of the African continent should start with taking stock of where Africa was before de-africanization/colonialism , where she is as a result of de-africanization, and the direction that she wants to take.