‘Is the black man still evolving?’

The black race has produced giants who have transformed the world in all spheres of life. Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr, Frederick Douglass, Shaka – the Zulu King whose tactics in warfare is still being studied in military academies worldwide, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Muhammed Ali, Pele, Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah etc. But why the beggarly antics of the black man leading to insults by Donald Trump and others? Have Africans forgotten so soon about the ancient great empires in Africa? So great that Ham one of the sons of Noah who survived the devastating flood which the almighty creator used to wipe out the then world represented the black race in Egypt. Remember how Jacob and his family went to settle in Egypt the land of Ham (Psalm 105-23)?
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Despite the earlier, we have failed to consciously move into civilisation. In Nigeria either we maim people to win elections, sit tight on governmental positions or cashier government monies for senseless cavortings.

We promote campaigns for “separate sovereignty” even when administrators in the supposedly “sovereign” do nothing to further the growth of the “needed sovereign.” I look at South Sudan and all I can do is shake my head. Nothing good comes from northern Mali. Eritrea with forced conscription into the armed forces with no time line and defaulters are killed. Central Africa Republic with their militia. Blacks in South Africa fared better under apartheid than even under the ANC government. Somalia for close to three decades has been overrun by gangsters. Uganda and the disappearance of government critics. Let’s not waste energy on Zimbabwe.

You needed to see the garrison of troops (soldiers) that was stationed outside the arena where a birthday was held today. They came not for the celebrant but for two senators who were there to rejoice with the Septuagenarian. It was no different from a war zone. I know so because I was invited to the occasion. Now you know why Boko Haram can’t be defeated. Not with soldiers overwhelmed in guarding private citizens. Many years ago, some militias were empowered in Nigeria, and these went about and decapitated people in some parts of Nigeria, for flimsy excuses and many justified the barbaric acts as: part of providing security. Heinrich Himmler would have appreciated their liberties.

The love for philistinism is so strong in this country that fortune hunters go in search of human heads. Some communities are known for this infamy. Many a community are also man-eating communities. It is not uncommon to hear someone say unabashedly in a joking manner:”we dei chop people for our village.” My friend comes from a community where discrimination is so high and where they treat some people as sub-human. We both frown at a practice that promotes the tall tale that ‘A’ is parenthetically better than ‘B’ only by the accident of birth that no one has a choice of?

The Nigerian is politically inert, apolitical, reason political players confine them to living in hovels and groveling in the dark.No wonder a Daniel François Malan can say hand-on-heart that, “the black man isn’t psychologically fit to drive a car because he can’t make one.” How far is this from the truth? The PAN assembly plant in Kaduna, I hear, passes for a museum. ANAMCO seemed to have happened in fantasy island as well as the Volkswagen plant we read about in the 1980s through to the 1990s.  No wonder a Michael Burleigh could write an article in the Daily Mail Online, August 9, 2013, titled, “Nigeria, a country so corrupt it would be better to burn our aid money.” Little wonder, Lord Lugard said that the “African is like a child who needs direction from adults.”

Nigerian forever craves to be associated with the white man’s land and she sent this reply. “‪I guess we have a pretty affluent society. But around where I live and where I work, I see a lot of homeless people (mostly mentally ill) who go hungry.

The poorer end of the city of Sydney has many beggars on the streets, living in the open, going through garbage bins, begging for food/money. There are soup kitchens there and shelters but not nearly enough.‬”Wait a minute. There are poor people in the white man’s land as well.

Georg Hegel could even rub insult to injury on Africa when he was quoted to have said this: “The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the category of universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realisation of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God, or Law – in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realises his own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting.

The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.”
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Are we this inferior? In the United States of America, the black race has a G.D.P of over I.1 trillion dollars annually more than the GDP of almost the entire African continent but they make up 53 per cent of the prison population there despite the fact that they are only 12 per cent of the entire population.
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In the U.S., many white people are drug lords and they need couriers to deliver the goods. Often, the deliverers of the goods are blacks. But drugs destroys the lives of these couriers, messengers who should just drop the goods to the consignee more than the drug lords, who mostly only taste the drugs minimally for quality.‬ A black person in America has a 93 per cent chance of being killed by a fellow black.These stats aren’t good. The black race is still evolving badly.
‬Abah wrote from Port Harcourt.
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