I agree with you entirely on this issue (Pan-African Postcard: Gluttons who vomit on shoes, 29 July 2004). I just wanted to say that this British High Commissioner is serving a country where pirates and thieves of the worst sort are worshiped as national heroes. This tells you everything about his lot.

Talk about gluttons, do they Europeans ever get satisfied with anything? They want to possess and control the whole world. And to think they are our “donors”: is Western Europe still not more dependent on Afrika than the reverse?

That British High Commissioner will never say one bit against his own country, where corruption is institutional. I have always pointed out the fact that in a place like “Cameroon” where I hail from, it is not really corruption when a policeman demands money in return for a favor or not; it is an exercise or abuse of power or position. But in a place like Western Europe where you find MPs sitting on the board of directors and where contracts are only awarded after heavy bribery, you will never hear them talk of corruption. And then Transparency International will come up with Cameroon as being the most corrupt country on earth. Ridiculous!

I see it as a relentless effort to control us by controlling our minds. And we are made to believe that we can only achieve progress if we stop the corruption, engage in voting for fools and so on. What nonsense! We Afrikans have to understand what the main issue is. We have to understand what it means to redefine ourselves after the long period of devastation through foreign involvement in our business.

They even go as far as choosing Mandela as Afrikan president of the century and Mugabe as the worst. And so the former is given red carpet treatment all over Europe and the later gets a hell of a whipping from the international imperialist press. But the Afrikan youths must understand that the President who addresses the land question (which is a very pressing issue) best is automatically the president of the decade or century. We have to understand basically that we live on what comes out of the land not on elections. First things first!

We have to be very critical in our thinking. We have to assess all these NGOs all over Afrika being financed from abroad. What a thing! Our governments are forced to cut down expenditure on vital domains like education and health care. At the same time NGOs are encouraged to carry out functions which only the state can carry out most effectively.

Talk about women’s rights: Can you separate women’s rights from human rights? And who came up with this? The World Bank! Can you imagine? And now our educated women go about repeating this without analyzing further. Don’t get me wrong. I oppose the maltreatment of women. I would be a bastard not to respect women. But a European male cannot educate me on women’s rights. Let him do his homework first.

I will not only say what displeases me without trying to suggest a solution. I think we need some serious education, not to be confused with literacy. Education is the ability to link one with his environment and literacy can serve as a very effective tool. This means that education has to start with historical knowledge, because it is history which teaches us about our background. A very central point in this is our cultural history.

Every time I see a black woman say she is a feminist I feel like crying. If she understood Afrikan history she wouldn’t say a thing like that. I am very much aware of the weakening of the central position of the Afrikan woman in society above all after the transatlantic slave trade period. We have to go beyond signing petitions on women’s rights, which seems to deviate our attention from the real issue, which is Afrikan liberation. You cannot talk about the rights of women in a society living in slavery.

We have to deal critically with issues like bearing European and Arab names and fooling ourselves that these are religious names. You find Afrikans using names like Peter, Paul, Mary, Linda and so on. What a shame! A name stands for an identity. Pambazuka the name of this site is an Afrikan word and means much. We should get out of the way if we cannot call ourselves like Afrikans should. We have to deal with foreign religions and the role they play in our underdevelopment. These are very pressing issues to be dealt with.

The Sister Eno Deborah Anwana wrote a well-researched article “Taking control of Africa’s resources”. I was a bit irritated by the last sentence mentioning the promotion of the African Union through NEPAD. I always thought the AU was an Afrikan creation and that the NEPAD was another initiative from the imperialist West to undermine the AU. Maybe she could inform me more on the issue.

I must say your website is well organized. I would like to know about your goals and aims.

Very often I have found that we Afrikans are very interested in moving forward whilst neglecting our past. We have to understand that we need to study the past in order to design the future. It is only when we understand this that we shall learn to stop imitating people who are imitating us. We should learn about people who tried to organize Afrikan communities all over the world. Our goal should be to create a synthesis of all Afrikan peoples at home and abroad. And we on the Afrikan continent have to understand basically that we are directly responsible for the well-being of Afrikans worldwide. When I write of Afrikans worldwide I mean each and every Blackman on this planet. In the past the Pan-Afrikan impulse came more from the Afrikans born abroad; this has to be equaled by those born on the mother continent. We on the mother continent should try to reach the others outside. The Afrikan Union will only succeed and be complete if we bear this in mind. We must remember that the Pan-Afrikan idea, which led to the creation of the OAU (AU) sprang up from the Caribics and evolved as a 3-way exchange between Afrikans in the Caribics, the American mainland and Afrika. Maybe this could serve as an impulse for your website.

Maybe you could also deal with the fact that we should learn about those leaders who tried to organize Afrikan peoples like the great Chaka Zulu, Nzinga, Marcus Garvey, Nkrumah, a.o. and also on prominent historians like the late great John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Ben, Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophile Obenga and the great Ivan van Sertima, a.o.

Continue with the good work.