The West and China in Africa

Civilization without Justice

Mekonnen

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498220194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The West and China in Africa: Civilization without Justice is an outcome of Dr. Alemayehu Mekonnen's personal intellectual struggle, life experience, and an attempt to understand Christ and his message within the cultural context of Africa. The intellectual struggle has to do with the paradoxical reality of Africa's situation. An attempt to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable situation of Africa tests and stretches anyone's mind beyond limit. According to archaeological and geological findings, Africa is the first habitat of humanity and yet it is the least habitable place in the world today. The continent is extremely rich with natural resources, but it is known for poverty, disease, malnutrition, and starvation. As some Afro-centric scholars argue, Africa is the birthplace of world civilization and yet it is known for destruction. Social instability is rampant; coup d'etat and counter coup d'etat is common. Displacement and the number of refugees are ever increasing. As a person of African origin and now a US citizen, Mekonnen was able to see realities objectively in the eyes of an African and American. This book explores the myth and reality of Western, Eastern, and African dictators' role in the history of Africa.

Chapter 1

Civlization

The racial arrogance of the West is old only as the power of the West is old, which has been for a mere moment of human time and a few centuries of registered history. Civilization is composite; an accretion of experience and ideas beyond race or region, and the term “Western civilization” is ultimately meaningless. Europe reads with the letters and counts in numbers that come from the crossroads of Africa and Asia. If in an area of the world commonly called the West, man first discovered how to split the atom, it was in the South that he probably first discovered how to make tools, and in the East that he probably first made fire. Newton’s apple-tree was planted a great deal closer to the Congo than to London or New York.129

Black Civilization in Egypt

It is crucial to begin at the beginning point that would redefine, restore, invigorate, and reshape the self-image of Africans and the history of the black race, which is: civilization.

The people of Africa have been brutally traumatized. European colonizers denigrated Africans for centuries as “subhumans” and denied them recognition of any meaningful intellectual, cultural, and historical accomplishment or experience. Called “savages,” millions of Africans were carted off in bondage as slaves to Americas. Even when Charles Darwin speculated that it was Africa, not a Garden of Eden in the Near or Far East, where the evolution of the human race to be traced, intellectual prejudices of the time precipitated a spirited rejection of the notion that something good or new could originated from Africa. Allegedly its people had no history, no culture, no civilization, and nothing of value to contribute to the creation of the human being.130

For centuries this myth about Africans has been made partly by simple tourists and partly in the name of academic research. Through the Western “scholarship” and media, the global community has been indoctrinated who Africans are—how backward, poor, illiterate, and uncivilized they are. Hence, the distorted perception about Africans and their culture is prevalent in the minds of the global community.

In this chapter we will see to what extent the labels and description given to black people by the West is erroneous, unfounded, misguided, and established by prejudices or how factual the academic research really was. To observe, validate, and propagate one’s “findings” of other people who are outside of his/her culture, language and custom, only from an outsider’s perspective, is, to say the least, ethnocentrism. “The imagined community of the nation contrast itself with the world outside. ‘We’ are special ‘they’ are inferior and do strange things. The sense of community in the modern world is developed and maintained by diverse means, including the reading of newspapers, editorial policies of which promote national identity most strongly by disparaging foreign people and nations.”131 The people of ancient Egypt themselves and their civilization, which became a bone of contention between Afrocentric and Western scholars, was not immune from one-sided interpretation of history.132 Such an approach cannot stand and the whole claim of any party cannot be proven to be totally true in the bar of reason. “The history of interpretation warns us to be aware of biases, both our own and those of others, in interpreting history. There is clear evidence of a Eurocentric racist bias in certain interpretations that exalt whites and denigrate blacks.”133 The first stage of racist Western action is to disconnect Egypt from Africa. “The study of Egyptology developed in concurrence with the development of the slave trade and the colonial system. It was during this period that Egypt was literally taken out of Africa, academically, and made an extension of Europe. In many ways Egypt is the key to ancient African history. African history is out of kilter until ancient Egypt is looked upon as a distinct African nation.”134

To do balanced research on a people and their culture, individuals who engage in such studies needs a meatacutural135 framework to do justice to their findings. Otherwise, even the best of minds like Diop or Philo, and even the apostle Peter, could not escape the trap of ethnocentrism. “All societies have complex laws and rules of proper social behavior, whether written or oral, to which people are expected to conform, and a range of sanctions to be imposed on those who break the laws and rules. In that sense all societies throughout humanity’s history have been civilized. Only during periods of breakdown of the social or political order does so-called uncivilized behavior predominate over civilized, and any society anywhere in time or place can potentially face such a breakdown.”136 It is in this light that we investigate African civilization.

There are two major kinds of approaches to African civilization. One comes out of a nervous aggressive intellectual reaction to the degrading remarks and labels of Western scholars of Africans’ past and present. The other one is passive resistance to the Western civilization. Mazrui summarizes both in this manner:

The massive cultural arrogance of Europeans was later to influence the indigenous personality of the continent, and create at times schizophrenia among the Westernised Africans. Defending themselves against the European contempt, one school of African thought emphasised Africa before the European had had its own complex civilizations of the kind of that Europeans regarded as valid and important—civilizations which produced great kings, impressive empires and elaborate technological skills. This particular school of African thought looked especially to ancient Egypt as an African civilization, and proceeded to emphasise Egypt’s contribution to the cultures and innovations of ancient Greece. A particularly illustration of this attitude is the work of the Senegalese historian and scientist, Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop’s effort to demonstrate that the civilization of ancient Egypt was not only African but Black, and that it provided the foundation of the intellectual miracle of ancient Greece, have been influential among Black people not only in Africa but also in the African Diaspora in the Americas.

We may call this school of African assertion as school of romantic gloriana. It seeks to emphasise the glorious moments in Africa’s history defined in part by European measurements of skill and performance, including the measurements of material monuments.

In contrast to this tradition of romantic gloriana is what might be called romantic primitivism. In this the idea is not to emphasise past grandeur, but to validate simplicity and non-technical traditions. Romantic Primitivism does not encounter European cultural arrogance by asserting civilizations comparable to that of ancient Greece. On the contrary, this school takes pride in precisely those traditions which European arrogance would seem to despise.137

The proponents of romantic primitivism include people such as Aimé Cesaire who invented the word négritude and Leopold Senghor, former president of Senegal and the most distinguished advocate of négritude. Senghor believes that “the great genius of Africa lay not in European concepts of rationality, but in indigenous capacities for intuition; not in the principles of scientific method and objectivity, but in the wisdom of custom and instinct; not in cold analytical reason but in warm responsive emotion. Hence, Senghor’s controversial dictum; ‘Emotion is Black . . . Reason is Greek.’ To the French philosophe...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Civlization
• Chapter 2: African Personhood—Being Human
• Chapter 3: Suffering in a Continent Teeming With Riches
• Chapter 4: Banks in a Bankrupt Continent
• Chapter 5: Compendium of Energy Resources
• Chapter 6: Africa
• Chapter 7: China in Africa
• Chapter 8: Leadership Crisis in Africa
• Chapter 9: Leading in a Turbulent Cultural Contexts
• Chapter 10: Christ
• Chapter 11: The Hope of Humankind in the Hopeless Continent
• Conclusion
• Bibliography