Ill of its reference marks and porous to all changes, hope of other people during the conquest periods, the Western culture has sunk into obsession by the tinsels of a world engaged in the unearned incomes’ economy. For having put aside the development of wisdom to prefer the frenzy of modernity, the world today evolves like in a race of the sheep: those animals which always follow their leader in tight rows and stupidly, whatever the direction, whatever the obstacles, whatever the danger incurred. The suffering or lame animals cling until exhaustion and fall, while the group head imperturbably continues its insane race. So are ruling classes of the poor countries in search of development, masterminded by Western gurus. These "house Negroes” lead disarmed people towards uncertainty; the inevitable disappointments involved resulting into ethnic-based conflicts. The announced return of Afro-Americans in Black Africa, for its part, doesn’t it present the unquestionable risk of a reinforcement of these classes?
Par Ndzana Seme, [Le Nouvel Indépendant, No 8, November 1st to 8th, 1993]
Victims of a secular confrontation, when the Western culture’s cantors never give up about putting an end to their domination on other cultures, the countries currently poor suffer much more of the assaults launched against their national identities than of their incapacity to be driven in a world engaged in the swirl of modernity surge. How can you cling when your means of action are all cut down, when one separates you from your essence, from your culture?
Late lamented Professor Cheik Anta Diop reminded us that the conflict goes back to ancient Egypt when the noses of the statues representing black elites were systematically broken in order to delete any traces of Negro-African culture in the history of the contemporary world’s construction. The violence that marked the world domination by groups of Westerners is revealing of a world inoculated with a culture of cruelty animating beings supposedly developed, but who rather sink with the miracles of modernity, unconscious of the values that differentiate the Man from the animal. When the Man always makes more discoveries about the matter, while remaining disarmed about the resolution of conflicts resulting from the matter, should we keep speaking of development? Should we keep speaking of development when the powerful of this ending twentieth century still argue in terms of fighting the Islamic invasion, like in the holy wars times?
In the Heart of Europe, we have watched the show of walking skeletons with disproportionate eyes, immense heads, victim as in Somalia of war for the property of the matter, for geographical spaces, for religions. And we are well at the era of optical fiber, nuclear fission, telematics, cognitive intelligence, hypertext, etc.
Culture of division essentially, the West found that the best solution to better managing the society and reaching the development of all would be capitalism, the Anglo-Saxon liberalism. Inseparable from the monarchy and from the feudal society, the Western world was built on structures where the separation of social classes survived the Ages of Enlightment. The triumphing neo-liberalism has just produced a deep gangrene which results in individualism, exclusion, unemployment. Manhattan Bridge and its daily batch of candidates for death is revealing of a development that takes place more and more with the exclusion of Man.
Communism remains today the unhappy experiment of a culture built with the exclusion of the necessary community. Clans of bureaucrats killed the ideal of the other nations trustful in the community perceived as the strength of the State structure.
Erased the definition of the great nation, the communist world now atomized is torn up by wars of "community against community, population against population, nation against nation” under the scorning glance of Western superpowers which see in them only opportunities to build their interests and to push back the presence of Islam or of Asian cultures. Forty six ethnic conflicts currently set ablaze the continent and appear to be of very little importance to the media and chancelleries apparently applying a "selective humanitarianism” .
Africa is torn up by similar confrontations since over a century because of the institution of the Western culture’s domination. From slavery system to the colonialist system, Africa has been denied any culture of its own. Its social organizations were vigorously classified as barbarian, as savage. The colonizer who undertook to write its history painted the Negro as a sum of negations . This is such that today the African himself judges his own ancestral culture through this kind of prisms.
Black Africa is however made up of a multitude of ethnic groups, nations, micro-States. And each ethnic group is a community which shares a common historical past, a common language, a common culture. A specific organization of the society, its own rules, and particular behaviors define each ethnic group.
In a few decades, the colonizer believed he was able to erase these cultures, able to impose his order and to establish his culture. Today, like in the old communist world, the ethnic groups, these nations and micro-States of Black Africa, return to their cultural sources after the institution of the multiparty system and of a Western-like democracy, and especially by security reflex because of the disappointments that a world ruled by a "global economy” leaves. The contempt that colonization showed for the other cultures, in its imposing of laws and borders traced without consideration of the legitimacy of these nations, is quite everywhere the main source of inter-ethnic conflicts which cunningly heat politicking debates in Black Africa.
Africans do not identify themselves with the official structure (State) imposed by the Occupier. It is in this direction that there is place to understand the sovereign national conferences these people are requiring - but which the colonizing powers vigorously reject (along with the U.S). Because, it is customary in Negro-African cultures that "the dirty linen is washed within the family": the famous African palaver.
The experiments of development copied from Western models ended up on the well known various failures, and our nations are limed into inextricable crises. It is thus surprising that Western powers fight in a little felted way the endogenous solutions suggested by the people and their elites who are the victims. This happens at the very time the United States finds that the solution to their recession is the application of the “theory of endogenous growth".
It is indeed common in Negro-African cultures that the community meets every time it is critical to solve a major problem, and for this purpose all can be questioned, the essential being to be able to attack the heart of the issue. Therefore it is inevitable to raise the question of the adequacy of the institutions in place, the competence and the legitimacy of those in charge of governing the country.
The "Eastern wind" uncovered the width of the abscess and the problem of nationalities challenges from now on those who once believed that the strength of the powder and of the gun that enabled them, with a simple chalk stroke, to impose borders anywhere they wanted to ensure their eternal domination over the other nations.
The democratic opportunity and the sufferings inflicted to the people by the Economism have vacuum-cleaned the first major problem that one believed it was definitely buried into history: the question of nationalities.
In a world where, throughout centuries, communities patiently forged organizations, languages, rules of the life, which are transmitted in spite of the attacks from generation to generation, isn’t it madness to believe that one can easily stripe these cultures by imposing - with a mass culture that is scout of the global economy - new organizations, new codes of life, new behaviors?
The Beti of Cameroun will always have difficulty to admit as just the fact that one adopts a decision because 51 individuals out of 100 are favorable, in spite of the 49 against, when his ancestral culture rather teaches him that a great decision must be adopted by consensus.
In the same way a Tutsi or a Hutu does not agree when he is taught that the land that he occupies in Zaire, in Uganda or Tanzania is not that of his country, and that his country would be called Rwanda or Burundi, i.e. elsewhere.
In majority of African cultures, the chief/king/leader is recruited within royal families or among the elites who characterized themselves by showing bravery or particular competences, according to criteria defined by the community. It is thus far from acceptable that an individual from a vassal family or who has showed until now only his total submission to the Occupier takes the reins of power in a State supposed to cap all the communities - while traditional elites opposed to the White’s school used to sent only the weakest of their sons. Could those who claim to gather the Beti nation around them have passed the tests of the So'o rite if it were still in force?
Traitors of the nation
But, as Malcom X had defined it, slavery or colonization systematically operated a separation of the dominated society in two very distinct groups: the "house Negroes" called the good Negroes; and the other Negroes qualified as barbarians and savages who needed to be rectified, persecuted, and exploited like beasts of burden. The "house Negro" is the one who says when his Master is sick, "we are sick". He is the one who refuses to follow his race brothers in their watchword of revolt against the slaver or the colonizer.
These are the "house Negroes" - designated during colonial times as "notable" and today as "elites" - who were installed as heads of State during the1960s "independences". They were granted all the means necessary for them to crush any nationalist, revolutionary movements.
This was the case with the UPC (Union of the Populations of Cameroon) and the neocolonial system still in power in our country. Charged by the former colonizer to ensure the exploitation of national resources to the benefit of neocolonialist lobbies (networks) back in the metropolis, they cannot perceive the development in terms of individual blooming of the nationals. They vigorously defend "the intangibility of the borders inherited colonization" and show only contempt vis-a-vis the aspirations of ethnic group-nations thus arbitrarily quartered. They ask that international agreements and treaties ratified by them be superior to the laws and the Constitution of the country. They are opposed to the idea of the people holding the supreme sovereignty.
They are the ones who cling today, like the sheep, within the framework of the "global economy" in the race of a world in waterspout, driven by the Western powerful.
They had more latitude of movement during the party-State era where dictatorship was easy. The "Eastern Wind" came to disturb the established order by calling on these people who were yesterday to be choked. These people develop today, as in the Caucasus or in Yugoslavia a surprising speech based on the logics of micro-cultures put at the extinguisher for a long time. It questions the colonialist order still in force. From now on culturally hybrid and plunged into economic crisis, the African citizen generally turns over against three principal enemies: the colonizing power, the "house Negroes" in power, the neighboring ethnic group. It is unfortunately the latter enemy who is the soft belly of the selected adversity, insofar as it is the closest. All this ends up in inter-ethnic conflicts often of a rare cruelty, in proportion to the volume of the abscess of long time contained frustrations.
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