DUNDEE KZN: What happened to our African identity?

Are we the results of colonisation in Africa? If the dark cloud of colonisation didn’t hang over our continent, is it guaranteed that things would have been different? When I say “things” I am basically talking about the way we think, the practice of what we are told to be our culture, religion, education, and even the language that we use in order to fit into the universal space. It seems like colonialism robbed or stripped us of the only thing that was meant to make us unique from those of the western part of the world and that is IDENTITY. Without identity and a sense of belonging we have no direction.

Colonisers won the greatest battle over us as Africans; the day they colonised our minds through the methods and teachings they imposed on us, such teachings and methods didn’t only have an impact on those who got colonised at that time but even the generation that followed felt and still carry the pain of the colonisers.

Much as we have been chained by colonialism and it’s still a debatable issue whether we are still chained or not at the present moment, but it makes a lot of sense and it gives a clear meaning when it is said that “Colonialism was not only a political imposition, but also a cultural one”. Our religion and education got affected also.

This alone should tell us as Africans that if we ever thought of colonialism as the act of political influence or affiliated then perhaps, we had different ideas and views than those of our colonisers in Africa. Did political imposition even matter to the colonisers? There are no sufficient reason colonisers would want to have dominance over something they already had dominance and control over, and that is politics. Although they might have had dominance when it comes to politics, they had no dominance over us as Africans when it comes to identity, language, religion, and the system of education.

The system of education in place must be declared as the worse system that was introduced by colonisers to have full control over the people of the African continent. How are we expected to exercise our minds to the maximum and to the ability that was meant to bring about a uniqueness in us while we were subjected and still subjected to the foreign education system that had an effect and took away our own identity from us? Language is something that is unique and it proves to be the element that was supposed to bring about uniqueness among the people of different nations and races. The moment you compromise your language in order to fit in; then the sense of your belonging, true identity gets to be compromised too.

I believe as Africans we are still chained. Especially because in the western side of the world, they’ve shown multiple times that they would never compromise their philosophical methods and sense of belonging just to fit in or to accommodate us, the Africans. Yet we are willing to do anything in order to accommodate them.

Education isn’t the only idea that was brought by colonisers to colonise Africans but also religion. What happened to African philosophy? African theology? I’m even tempted to ask about African Science!

Colonialism had another idea about African philosophy. There was nothing important about African philosophy when it comes to colonialism, as it had no value or no room for importance hence even today western philosophy is still found to be in dominance. For Africans to taste perfect decolonization, it is important that special attention must be directed to valuable things to us Africans; such as language, sense of belonging, and identity.

Colonization is the major issue that still needs to be revisited with the aim of convincing solutions that will accommodate Africans. We must fight for our identity.

 
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