VILHO HANGULA



OVER THE YEARS, the media has been inundated with stories of how governments in Africa have been awarding tenders to Chinese companies, doing deals, and resultantly creating a rule of patronage and state capture that has seen non-Africans turning into overnight multibillionaires at the exclusion of our own people.

Not so long ago, we read about the story of Stina Wu (Chinese woman) who has amassed wealth, ostensibly because of her friends in government, and she enjoys privileges that citizens don't. The same story can be told about the Guptas in our neighbouring South Africa.



People come from outside the continent under the pretext and disguise of investment, and corruptly acquire wealth because our leaders are not Afrocentric, and love to hate their own people.



The passion to hate ourselves is entrenched deep into our general African social fabric, and requires surgical analyses to successfully extract it out of our minds as it has been formidably engraved in us by systems such as apartheid, colonialism, and capitalism with the help of religion.



We are engulfed in a vicious cycle of self-hate that encompasses hatred for our own food, professionals, products, companies, people, systems, our own languages and worse off, our own cultural values. Everything of foreign origin is viewed and perceived as mightier than that of local origin.



Employment is granted to those who graduate from overseas institutions often at the exclusion of our local graduates, leaders send their children to study overseas, leaders seek medical services overseas, some even shop for clothing and furniture overseas. I can go on with this list, but it all highlights how much our leaders make colonialism a success story.



If you have low faith in yourself or products produced locally or you hate tribe A or people from African country B, it is time you knew that you perpetuate and advance the ideals of apartheid and colonialism, and you are an accomplice to the masterminds of the divide and rule doctrine.



One can observe with regret how we are losing grip of our own identity and values as a people, whereby you see parents raising children who are not proficient in their mother tongue without any iota of shame or remorse. One can see people giving preference to carbonated soda/coke over oshikundu/ontaku (traditional drink brewed from fermented millet), and people preferring pizza over mahangu (millet) porridge.



Only if they knew that the latter of their food and drink preferences were more nutritious than the former, but because of lack of decoloniality (and sheer ignorance), they believe otherwise.



It would be remiss of me not to mention the sporadic use of middle names by most people, particularly in Namibia and in Africa at large. Because these names are in most cases in native languages, people are shy of names they don't know the meaning of, and prefer to be called Catherine over Ndapandula, Gideon over Heingura.



This is testament of how we continue to make colonialism a resounding success without realising how the system made us acquiesce to a regrettable norm of self-loathing. The system made us give up on our identity to the detriment of ourselves; we define civilisation on the basis of how un-African one is; we equate development to anything that is foreign and European; we look down on our own languages and cultural values as we declare foreign languages pre-eminent. Languages like English that we should only use to communicate amongst each other are now used to measure intelligence, competence, and to disassociate ourselves from our own values and norms.



It might be too late for most, if not all of us, to transform and fully decolonise our minds. But it would be a noble cause to lay a foundation upon which future generations will buttress their decoloniality, and hence the need to begin fighting the mental struggle, to restore African values and self-love. There exists a considerable upsurge of lacklustre parenting amongst young adult parents which demonstrates a total compromise to the African future. In the moribund astute morality within society and lack of self-identity, we see indescribable crimes committed, and it serves as a premonition foreboding a moral crisis in the near future. Let's intervene by devising decolonised curricula as an antidote to the brainwashing of colonialism: education with proper curricula across Africa can be used as a springboard to leapfrog ourselves and children to self-reliance, self-love, self-emancipation and total independence.



We have won the political struggle, and we are busy fighting the economic struggle which we might never win if we don't fight the mental struggle. These are all struggles that require unity of purpose, tactful strategies, honesty and introspective discourses here and there, but surely need to be fought with an open mind and a critical heart.







* Vilho Hangula is a Namibian youth, follow him on Twitter @VilhoHangula