There is an aspect to President Paul Kagame’s tireless advocacy (for Africa to galvanise itself into the task of pulling itself from its lowly status as the world’s least developed region) that, at least in my humble opinion, deserves closer attention than it’s received so far. We already are aware of the president’s passion for mindset change of Africa’s people, in behavior. Because such change is crucial for the continent’s ability to turn its fortunes around and begin catching up with the rest of the world. The enormity of what Kagame has set out to tackle is what’s truly remarkable. It is something no less profound than starting a movement to get masses of people to adapt completely different ways of seeing the world from how they came up seeing it. It calls for the rewiring of minds of an entire continent. But it must be done. Because to fail is to condemn ourselves to being the world’s backwaters, forever. Let’s think of where we are as Africans, and what our place in the world is. We only are consumers of what others produce. At the same time, we’ve long been resigned to the thinking that anything good is either in America, Europe and, increasingly, Asia. As Africans, so many of us long ago internalised the idea that only Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and now Chinese, can make machines, manufacture ultra-high-value items, beginning with massive things like planes and ships, on to road vehicles, and a myriad other technology-based apparatuses and conveniences. As for us Africans – if we are being totally honest with each other – it’s just inconceivable that the average sub-Saharan society can muster either the capacities or the wherewithal to do anything the tiniest bit resembling what others consider basic technologies. The factories in African cities are built with parts imported, bit by bit, from overseas. Beyond that, Africans also have been socialised to think there isn’t one good service that African societies can perform. And so, the only good hospitals to go to, if we can afford it, are in the West (and India and China now). Ditto with schools. It is a measure of Kagame’s greatness that he finds this state of affairs totally unacceptable, and will spend time, resources, and tireless effort to at least get the conversation started on how to change it. “What is wrong with us that we cannot do anything for ourselves?!” is a question he frequently asks. And so, the president envisions a continent-wide movement to inspire more self-belief in Africans and help people internalise the understanding that, as humans, we too possess the same qualities as others all over the world. This is why he’s championed initiatives like the African School of Governance, whose goal is to help shape future generations of Africans with completely different mindsets: confident, competitive, imbued with the conviction that whatever any overseas people can do, we too are capable of. The president’s thinking is nothing short of revolutionary. Why? It goes to the heart of a debilitating problem that’s been around for hundreds of years We all know how centuries of colonial subjugation of Africa led to its people developing deeply entrenched complexes of inferiority - especially in relation to people of white European ancestry. Africans saw their invaders come with advanced technologies, and with fearsome machines of war that rapidly spat fire, killing multitudes in mere minutes. They felt they had been invaded by other-worldly beings. It was only human that our ancestors, all the way down to our grandparents, who for the first time were being exposed to the workings of machine guns, steamboats, electricity, airplanes, telephones and so on, would actually think Europeans “talked with the gods”. That was how bad things got. It only followed that Africans developed deeply entrenched convictions that only the white man was capable of big, clever, magical-like inventions. There was no way our ancestors could have known that the technologies and innovations the European colonizers introduced were the result of centuries of accumulation of knowledge gathered, borrowed, or copied from other peoples all over the world. The outcome of all this was that our people ended up completely convinced they were not capable of any big achievements and consequently didn’t even try. This is the debilitating mindset that, as meetings like the recently concluded Africa Mindset Reset Forum amplify, is in urgent need of fixing.
