Africans must do everything possible to chart their future

Editor, RE: “Why large crowds instill a climate of fear” (The New Times, July 17). One gets the clear impression these people think we are completely devoid of the memory of the ceaseless pains they have inflicted on us since they first erupted on our lands. That they are capable of forever leading us by our noses to follow their choices for how we organise and manage our affairs primarily in their interest, even as we banish into the memory-hole all the history of their genocidal dealings with us, from slavery to extensive colonial repression and multitude of indignities and to the continuing neo-colonial expropriation and role in our underdevelopment and persistent civil, social and political conflicts in which their hand is always involved. I am forever amazed that there are still today Africans who seem ignorant of the West’s toxic role in our pathological condition, and that no cure can involve the continuing hold on – or even any role – of our colonizers in our affairs. Until we wrest complete charge of our own affairs from those who continue to under-develop us as Walter Rodney warned us in his 1973 seminal work (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), we shall continue to be like flotsam on the surface of the ocean. I highly recommend those who have never read that publication to do so, and those who did to re-read it, for nothing has changed since then. If anything, our condition is even worse, for more and more of our people are beset by a sense of hopelessness which was not the case 45 years ago; then much of Africa was hopeful of our future. Mwene Kalinda

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Africans must do everything possible to chart their future