Africa Day is the annual commemoration of the founding of the Organization Of African Unity, now known as AU, on 25 May 1963. The organization was made up of independent states who at the time committed to assisting other African nations to attain liberation from their colonial masters and improve living standards across member states. This year the theme for Africa Day is "SilencingTheGuns: Creating Conducive Conditions for Africa's Development and Intensifying the Fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic."
The Founding Fathers of the OAU.
Decades after this historic day, we still commemorate the day but then what are we celebrating? In 2020 colonialism or rather let me say, White minority rule is not a problem anymore and we have bigger problems to fight like the loss of African identity and the economic dependency. These are modern problems that need fresh minds and that's why I find it unfair for African countries to be undermining the value of young people as key policy-makers, most countries in Africa are led by old men and women who hold on to office due to the entitlement they have for "liberating" the countries. Progress in every sector remains the primary objective for organizations like the AU but attaining this desired goal is proving to be getting harder and harder by the day because old systems are meant to be dealing with modern problems, there's no logical reasoning behind this.
There are many young people who have sought to understand what it meant to be African before colonialism as they believe that is true Africanism. This is a good initiative because one has to understand that the western ideals we have adopted were systematically forced on our forefathers, but then the tricky part is trying to relive a long gone past instead of focusing on the future because the history on its own is already distorted and pointing out what is true and what is mythical proves to be difficult because one can be subject to bias. I'm not discouraging young people from seeking to understand ancestral beliefs but there has to be caution in trying to self-identify because that can halt progress, imagine a scenario where we have old people who are still in power and all they do is try and bring up the glorious past in order to feel entitled to ruling then we have young people who also console themselves by making everything about what the ancestors lost. Such a scenario would limit progress honestly speaking. Let's not use the past as an escape from reality before our eyes.
The hope for Africa lies in establishing systems of self-determination. If the systems set up by our colonialists have been able to profit them then we would do well in imitating such systems too. At the end of the day we can't deny that the western world has determined the fate of Africa and that will never be reversed, the only thing that can be done is to work with the system in place to benefit us too. Instead of our leaders allowing foreign companies to come to take our natural resources at cheap prices, we could have our own processing plants in order to sell goods that are ready to be bought/ consumed. This continuous dependency on the western continues to diminish the value of Africans in every sector, even in the creative sector we find that governments like the government of Zimbabwe don't do much to invest in local talent then next thing people are subject to foreign culture since foreign art dominates the mainstream. The only way to make it especially in the music industry is to be signed to a multinational record label like Universal Music, record labels that aren't even from Africa.
Another question I'd like to ask is how the hell did a continent with abundant natural resources normalize this toxic culture of food aid from international bodies like the UN? It's sad what these old people have turned a beautiful continent into, day by day they prove that it's mostly about the preservation of their power than progress, I'm talking about all those entitled African dictators who live in mansions while children go to bed hungry, while basic rights are being violated. The African dream is to leave Africa and try to be a slave in another country, at least one will get convenient services and survive. It's not everyone who's creative enough to identify opportunities through crises, many people just believe in the concept of politicians having to do everything for them and that is dangerous thinking when we have unreliable politicians. Everything is leaving Africa, our identity, our rights, our resources.
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