My final semester in College was the most memorable because of a course I registered on African American Politics and a brief acquaintance with Doris, an African American exchange student. She was from Howard University and beautiful of course. I took politics of the African American Experience purely out of curiosity and I was even more convinced that the course was for me when I met Doris on my first day at the class.

She walked daintily across our small lecture hall, and sat beside me. I couldn’t talk to her the first day because I couldn’t. She sat beside me again the second day and the third day and that was when I gathered enough courage to say hi. Her reply was sweet and shy. And we became friends.

I became extra committed to the course because of course we fell in love eventually or so it seemed till one fateful day. Our Lecturer, a good man and an African American himself, was commenting on Politics and racism in America. He lectured passionately about how politics, the struggle for power and the distribution of resources is also a game played with rules. This game becomes unfair when those who make the rules of the game are themselves competitors. He elaborated on how Blacks in America are marginalized while at the same time their poverty is blamed on their culture, black culture he called it. I raised my hand during a point in his delivery, and when asked to speak, I stood up and said “I think the biggest problem Africans have is psychological, and I think there is a point to it when people say there is a poverty culture which can itself be a problem in alleviating poverty”

Doris never spoke to me nor came to the class again till we left college. She resented the statement and I understood her disdain quite perfectly, the only problem was that she never understood me at all. From where she was coming from it was understandable to be critical at an African who has abandoned the cause of the tribe. But then again she did not understand me.

The worst damage that has been done to Africans by slavery and colonialism had not been the deprivation, the humiliation or the human rights abuses that had been associated with these institutions but the psychological and mental trauma Africans everywhere went through under these regimes. Doris’ reaction to my statement was expected of any African who thought I meant Africans had mental issues. Africans have got issues though but it’s not those issues I meant to talk about when I said what I said.

Africans through the instruction and observation of the institutions of slavery and colonialism learnt over centuries of their inferiority and sub humanness. The mental disposition enabled by these institutions still informs the decisions and choices of Africans today. The material damage done to Africans even though colossal cannot match the harm inflicted on the African psyche. Apologists of Colonialism these days even refute the argument that colonialism was predatory and not in the interest of the African. In his article Two Cheers for Colonialism, Dinesh D’souza tries miserably to defend colonialism. Though it’s not the object of this article to respond to his arguments, I think it’s worth making a few comments about his analysis for the purpose of building a foundation for this piece. D’souza makes three main points in his delivery. The first is that there is nothing uniquely western about colonialism. Secondly the west did not become rich and powerful through colonial oppression and thirdly, the descendents of colonialism are better off than they would be if colonialism had never happened.

D’souza treated colonialism generally but I will like to skew in on the part concerning Africa. His first point dealt with the fact that colonialism was not peculiar to Africa and he enumerates the activities of various imperial powers to buttress this. The point is obviously true; Africans were not the only people to be colonized nor was the west the first colonizers. But a closer look at colonialism would show that the style of colonialism and Africa’s incorporation into the world economy was quite different and much more destructive than that of say India or anywhere else. Apart from the fact the economies of Africa were built basically to provide raw materials to serve western industries which it still does, the very culture and psyche of the people was targeted. I would comment on the primacy of culture to the survival of a people shortly. But when the very self of a people are eliminated, what becomes of them? Dummies. For the African every shred of his culture was supposed to be severed to be modern and acceptable. This thinking is still very prominent today in western literature which blames the culture dysfunction of Africans for their underdevelopment. The World Bank, International financial institutions and other well meaning western countries convinced of the truth that the African is not westernized enough hence their backwardness spend huge monies trying to modernize him. These monies which end up in the pockets of corrupt politicians anyway become another burden for the poor African tax payer.

Consultants are hired almost on a daily basis to diagnose the cause of the African’s problems. And their recommendations range from sympathy to outright insult of Africans. Some even identify corruption as an aspect of African culture. Ha ha The point here is that intellectuals like D’souza on one hand and Black activists on the other both fail to appreciate that mental damages are even damages at all. But it is to me the most important reason that arguments for reparations are valid. Doris failed to recognize this too.

D’souza attributes the industrialization of the west to the development of science, democracy and capitalism. But he fails to recognize that democracy and capitalism inspite of its achievements do not produce wealth by itself. For a capitalist system to work there must be an exchange “trade”. Capitalism in Europe would not have succeeded if there had not been any body to exchange goods with and sometimes disproportionately in value. That is where the colonies came in. America had no colonies but of course it had the free labour of an internal colony. Between the 18^th and 19^th centuries the west did not develop simply because it had science, democracy and capitalism but because of its interactions with others during that period.

From the 1200s, Europe was in an Ice Age. According to experts the temperature during this period plummeted and was characterized by very harsh weather. Famine was prevalent and, many communities were dislocated as the ice spread from Norway to New Zealand this period lasted more than 700 years. During this period the Arab world and later Asia led the world in science, technology and industry. The west began emerging from the Ice Age in the late 18^th century. And that was when it started to develop at a very fast rate and eventually dominating the world. Does the development of the West have anything to do with the Ice Age? Not quite, however this period built in people of the northern hemisphere an aggressive culture. One had to be aggressive and sometimes even predatory to be able to survive in such a brutishly cold environment. Men had to plan ahead on planting, harvesting, and storage of food. shelter and most importantly security for themselves.

This new attitude helped in the accelerated growth of the region, but it does not explain the reason for the growth. One can only understand the reason for the growth when it is realized that it was around this period (1884-95) that Europe set out officially to divide and colonize Africa an enterprise propelled by a very disciplined and acquisitive culture. When such a culture came into contact with the less robust and highly permissive African culture, the end result would not be to the advantage of the African. So it’s not just a coincidence that the period of the rise of Europe is almost the same as the period of colonialism.

Let me say a few words about Culture before I proceed. There has been a lot said and attributed to African culture since God knows when. The question therefore is what is African culture? And how different is it from others? Gabriel Marquez defines culture as the totalizing force of creativity, the social utilization of human intelligence. Culture is the product of man’s interaction with his environment. When I say environment, I am not referring to the social surroundings but to the natural world of land, sea, air, plants and animals. The social aspects are quite secondary because they are determined and structured by the primary environment. The environment presents its problems and culture evolves when man set about solving them. Cultures are varied and diverse because their environment is varied and diverse. According to Kwame Gyekye, though all cultures are faced with the same problem, that is procuring “the good life” for its members, the approach of every culture to achieving this goal is different and so is the level of success. This however does not necessarily mean that cultures are mutually exclusive and cannot be measured. Cultures can be measured based on how well they do in achieving the good life.

Another aspect of culture is that it is not innate but a product of the soil. In otherwords, no groups of people come to the world with a particular set of worldviews and predetermined ways of doing things. Ignorance of this is the root of racism and bigotry. Racism breeds in cultures that are unaware of the link between culture and the environment and are convinced that communities develop because they were created with superior capacities than others. The European experience with the Ice Age shows there is nothing called culture per se but what has happened to a group. The natural environment conditions the social behaviour of a people. It can be observed that even among countries on the northern hemisphere, there were significant variations in levels of development especially during the 19^th century, all of which can be explained by the critical analysis of their natural environment. The environment provides the motivation and the raw materials for building any society.

So when I say African culture I am referring to a particular way Africans go about solving their problems. There is nothing strange or mystical about such an effort. Since culture is not something inborn though it can become intrinsic over a period of time, it can not be used as a measure of the worth of a person or a group of persons. In other words culture is synthetic or woven from a community’s a posteriori knowledge of the world. Culture can thus be properly defined as procedures of living conditioned by a particular environment over time. Majority of people have over the years held on to the impression that the greater the achievements i.e. the more computers and skyscrapers created by a particular culture, the greater the net worth of a people. They argue that culture is the representation of how a group has adapted to their environment and since this adaptive process involves some form of intellectual effort. Culture can be used to assess the worth of their collective intelligence cumulated over the years.

But any such exercise can only be worthwhile, if the problems encountered were the same and constant. That is not to say that culture has no intellectual imprints of its owners. Far from it, it is purely an intellectual creation, but because culture is the reaction to a cause, my interest is not so much about the cause but the causal agent. Differences in the causal agents results in different reactions hence different societies. Cultures are indicators of where one is rather than who he is. This exercise is not to prove that culture is irrelevant but to put it into the proper perspective. Culture is critical to the development of all societies not because it is intrinsic to them but because it consist of procedures and methodologies proven by these people to work over the years and therefore trusted by them.

And so when proponents of developmental theories feed the world with barrages of value laden hypothesizes and racist literature about why Africa is underdeveloped and attributes the poverty to a dysfunction of culture to put it mildly. They ignore the meaning of culture itself just in their haste to prove the superiority of their own culture. If culture is a way of life as sociologist say then it means it is an evolutionary process because life itself is not static. Both the Africanist and the Racist got it wrong. They both raised culture almost to the level of mystic and the divine. By their understanding culture belongs to the metaphysical realm and is inherently what the individual is. The Racist accepts this argument in order to confirm his belief that some are better humans than others. And the Africanist accepts this argument to prove why cultures are incomparable and why he should not be blamed for the failings of his culture to procure the good life. But the argument still stands supposing God created cultures and since it is evident no matter what ones criteria for measuring the good life is, that some have succeeded in creating better societies than others, it can be inferred that God created some human beings better than others. But this is not the case. The only thing God has to do with culture was to create the people who produced it.

Culture is considered something divine and mysterious especially within tribes and smaller cultural groupings because the scope of activity is limited in such communities and their daily endeavors therefore takes on a repetitive routine. The repetition of their activities of life creates an aura of religiosity and reverence around it. But this still does not necessarily change what culture is, the way people get things done.

So it is wrong when an aberration is blamed on the inadequacies of a culture and scholars purport that it’s because of some innate peculiarities of the individuals within those cultures. But it is easier scholarship and fashionable for scholars to ignore other variables and focus on culture because it is the kind of stuff that makes it to CNN.