GOD NA OYIBO? 1

This is a re-write of a note I posted on Facebook a couple of years ago. I recently revisited it because I got on that bus again.

Does God have a preference for Caucasians? God na oyibo? See, this really bugs me.
How did my ancestors commune with God before the missionaries?
Were they really the pagan savages the whiteman tells us they were?
Could my ancestors have known God?
Why does Christianity make you doubt that?
Could God have sent the white man to save us or did the white man see a means to exploit us and used it?

I am a convicted Christian and happy to remain so, but I wonder at the denigration of all things pre-colonial African e.g our spirituality.
It is saying a whole lot if we could not have seen the light but for the oyibo man (pun intended).




"In character and temperament, the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person. Lacking in self control, discipline, and foresight. Naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewellery. His thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from the apprehension for the future, or grief for the past. His mind is far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals’ placidity and want of desire to rise beyond the State he has reached. Through the ages the African appears to have evolved no organized religious creed, and though some tribes appear to believe in a deity, the religious sense seldom rises above pantheistic animalism and seems more often to take the form of a vague dread of the supernatural"
“He lacks the power of organization, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business. He loves the display of power, but fails to realize its responsibility ....he will work hard with a less incentive than most races. He has the courage of the fighting animal, an instinct rather than a moral virtue...... In brief, the virtues and defects of this race-type are those of attractive children, whose confidence when it is won is given ungrudgingly as to an older and wiser superior and without envy.......Perhaps the two traits which have impressed me as those most characteristic of the African native are his lack of apprehension and his lack of ability to visualize the future."

---Lord Frederick John Dealty Lugard, The Dual Mandate, pg.70 (1926)"

Sadly some of it rings true but that's a post for another day. Most of it though, is a lie. Most of it is the conditioned African.
Yes I'm saying that the Lord Lugard that we learnt songs about in primary school is a blatant liar.

Here is an example. "Through the ages the African appears to have evolved no organized religious creed, and though some tribes appear to believe in a deity, the religious sense seldom rises above pantheistic animalism and seems more often to take the form of a vague dread of the supernatural".  Really?
Among the many tribes of Nigeria are the Yoruba's. Go HERE for and in-depth look at the Yoruba traditional religion which dates back far before colonialism.  

Among the many fallacious assertions contained in that document lay it's one purpose. In my opinion, it is a deliberate attempt by the colonial masters to undermine the African mind for reasons of manipulation then and now.

Is that where the key to our problems and consequently solutions lay?

We were once regal beings; Living in dignity and at peace with our world. Innovative, smart, brave, spiritual etc but something came and changed it.
Something to which it is important that we remain in this confused acrimonious state.

The groan from the weight of the shame for what we have become is deafening now. Can you hear it? I can. Our ancestors are whirling in their graves.

We are proud hard working people(on our backs the western world was built). Why have we sunken to this amoral, looting, self hating people? Because on our backs the Western world was built? Think on it.

The falsehood of our perception of who we were(and ultimately are) and our significant contribution to world history today is in my opinion one of the main reasons for such small mindedness as displayed by many of us. An inferiority complex, if you may. Hard to accept but true.
That and the magnification and amplification of our flaws by the likes of Lugard.

According to Credo Mutwa (one of the remaining keepers of the oral history of the Zulu Nation in South Africa) systematic genocide was carried out against his elders by the British in a deliberate attempt to destroy any record of Zulu history. He also said emphatically that similar acts were carried out all over Africa. 

What were they trying to destroy, quell, prevent, hide.....delay? Why the subversion?
What were/are they afraid of?

A Yoruba proverb says we become who we are by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
If we do not know how, where, how much our ancestors stood or what they stood for, we flounder.

As a child I thought Nigeria and Africa as a whole actually began to function when the white men discovered us, prior to that we were just a bunch of skin wearing savages waiting for rescue. They sold us that image and we bought it. Is it any wonder Nigerians loooooooove to be more foreign than Nigerian? From our food, clothes, entertainment to our accent etc., the predominant feeling is of inferiority to the Western world.

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present,we shall find we have lost the future. ~ Winston Church Hill 

Why were/are we so mindless of our heritage?
*Sad sigh* 

What legacy did we bestow on world technological advancement? I refuse to accept in totality, the main stream media's accounts. It doesn’t follow.

It is time for us to retrace our footsteps.


CONTINUE HERE

* Yes the pictured is blurred. Yes it is a metaphor for our blurred perception.