I think therefore I am: effects of mental slavery on Africa

By Africans Adviser 

In 1883, King Leopold 2 of Belgium, penned a letter to the missionaries in Congo instructing them to teach Africans the Bible in a way that will make them submissive to Belgian. He commanded the missionaries to emphasize Biblical scriptures that show that ‘Africans should love and cherish poverty as a way to heaven’. ‘Blessed are the poor…’ and ‘it is very difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven…’, were some of the scriptures the missionaries were to use to make Congolese hate riches. Other colonial powers across the continent employed the same tactics in different ways.

In South Africa and Zimbabwe, the few who managed to go to school were not allowed to pursue academic disciplines which would enlighten them. Instead the colonial establishments, enrolled them to study such fields as carpentry and building.

According to Cheryl Tawede Grill, a professor of Clinical Psychology at Loyola Marymount University, mental slavery has devalued many things and these include ‘humanity, worth, intellect, culture, morals, sexuality, hair and skin.’ With over a century of exposure to injustice and violence, Africans are inevitably bearing the brunt of mental enslavement.

The best way to understand the effects of mental slavery is to imagine our own mental associations. What comes to our minds when we think of Africa? What comes to our minds when we hear of black people? It is highly likely that many imaginations will be littered with negative associations that mirror prejudices and the information that we have been fed with over the years.

If you ask someone in the streets which company he/she would choose to work for between the one run by a fellow African and the other run by a foreign national, chances are that the person would prefer to be employed by a foreigner. I have often heard on many occasions fellow Africans disparaging themselves and remarking that there was nothing that they could do on their own to turn around the fortunes of the continent.

But as Africans we should believe in ourselves before we expect the world to believe in us.

As an African proverb goes, “until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,”we should always be cognizant of the need tell our own story.  Others have twisted our story to their own liking and as a result, Africa has for a long time been linked with all forms of negative associations that are detrimental to its socio-economic progress. The continent should not silently watch as international media continue to obliterate its history.

What worsens the situation is the fact that mental slavery has not been observed in ordinary people only, but even in those who should be giving leadership. Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba, Director of Kenyan Law School, notes that the same politicians who speak positively about their countries’ universities and hospitals are the first to send their kids abroad to learn.
Modern governance machinery has not helped things. The glaring service delivery failure by governments across the African continent has given birth to dearth of public and national confidence. National confidence is key to national development. Without which people will find no impetus to work hard and in the process fail to effectively render the much needed public support for governments’ development initiatives. According to conventional development wisdom, wherever there is a rapidly developing nation, there is a supportive and confident population. Public confidence encourages positive public actions such as investment, innovation, enterprise and ultimately productivity that in-turn stimulate economic growth. Classical examples are Japan, South Korea, United States of America and Spain among many others whose citizens directly or indirectly embraced and supported national policies in the notion of the public good, and eventually drove their economies on the path to stability and sustainable growth.