Post-Colonial Traumatic Stress Disorder Syndrome: A commentary on Africa’s two paradigms

By Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, Ph. D.

It is reported in some of the Western press that the Pope made a statement in Kenyaon Friday November 26^th, 2015 that “Africa is a Continent of Hope”. This is certainly a great endorsement of Africa’s outlook than some of the Western media and African personalities have accorded Africa. It is like the Paradigm of whether a cup is half full (hopeful) or half empty (negative).

A lot of Western media still write Africa. A National Post (Canada) journalist and columnist Robert Fulford, once published an article that commented on the historic and unprecedented success of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer’s first book entitled Things Fall Apart. The book is more than 50 years old. Chinua Achebe was an unmitigated success according to Fulford, compared to the “colossal failure of Africa”. “The down-trodden colonial Nigeria depicted in his first book has evolved into the downtrodden post-colonial Nigeria of today, afflicted by corruption, militarism, hunger, tribal warfare and AIDS”. Fulford extends this Nigerian tragedy to the rest of Africa.

I have no quarrel with Fulford’s depiction of Nigeria and Africa as marred in tragedy, corruption, militarism for the most part, poverty, AIDS and other ills. There is simply no excuse for Africa’s failure to get its act together and aggressively address the problems that it faces.

The problem I have with Fulford is his utter failure and silence, like most western scholars, to comment on the well-known and proven western governments’ and western institutions’ complicity, aiding and abetting of African corruption, militarism, poverty and other ills not only in contemporary terms but in historic perspective as well. See Charles Mwewa’s book, Zambia: Struggles of My People ( Lusaka: Maiden Press 2011) Problems caused by African leaders’ practices and corruption as well as ineptitude are serious enough on their own. But when compounded by western complicity and duplicity makes them absolutely unsolvable and bleak. Martin Meredith’s much heralded book, The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, A History of 50 Years of Independence is along the lines of Fulford’s article. It eschews historical antecedents that have shaped Africa’s future. (Meredith like Fulford are capable of transcending parochialism as can be learnt from Meredith’s biography of Nelson Mandela). A film like Lumumba also tells part of the story. The West still meddles in Africa as can be gleaned from films like Blood Diamond and books like Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa and Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside M15 and M16.

The western countries have already cast a long pole on African conditions which I refer to as akin to Post-Colonial Traumatic Stress Disorder Syndrome (PCTSDS), a condition which cannot be solved without addressing its historical origins and continuing reverberations. If you would like to know the trauma that the west imposed on Africa and how that trauma continues to echo into the present, please read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire ;Frantz Fanon’s,                   The Wretched of the Earth ; Rene Dumont’s, False Start in Africa to just mention a few publications that make the point most poignantly. The first and last books deal with Africa as a whole, the second with the Congo and the third deals with Kenya. Can anyone say apartheid did not leave long lasting scars in South Africa or Zimbabwe.

This is not to excuse Africa from transcending the historically given. Africa can but to forge t the past and the scars that are still visible is folly.

Not only did the West bequeath Africa with the current problems, it has continued to exercerbate them. British oil companies like Shell Gas have continued to wreck havoc, environmental pollution and poverty in Nigeria as I write. Nigerian dictators continued to stash away billions of ill-gotten money into Western banks without recourse. Western governments have continued to arm every African dictator in history and with impunity. Western governments armed and supported the economic and military mighty of the South African Apartheid regime until the late 20^th century. When a few African governments tried to provide economic stimulus packages to their impoverished citizens, Western governments and their institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund cried wolf, and condemned the so-called subsidies and threatened to stop economic loans and imposed all types of conditionalities. The result was and is the continuing unprecedented poverty that we see in Africa. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were silent when Western governments were dishing out economic stimulus packages to financial and other institutions in 2008/2009/2010. Where is their outrage which they displayed when it came to a few African governments that were trying to help their people?

Just like western governments maintained a blind eye to corporate institutions and corporate criminals that have now caused the financial and economic disasters of this era beginning in the first decade of the 21^st Century, so did western governments keep a deathly silence when their corporations and governmental institutions wrecked havoc in Africa, with the complicity of corrupt African leaders!

Western journalists, columnists and scholars have a duty since they have assigned themselves the task of commenting on Africa, to deal with the impact of western practices on the worsening of African poverty, corruption and other ills.

For African regimes however, the opposite should be the reality. They should no longer blame Western governments for their incompetence to run their politics and economies. Fifty years is a long time to continue sucking at their mothers breasts.