Outside Behavior

This is Brazil, Anita is a known global celebrity openly celebrating and eulogising Èṣù, Ọ̀làọ̀ròyè, yet the very people whose ancestors gave birth to this culture are busy demonising it. You have been conditioned to believe that Èṣù represents the devil. If Yoruba people who grew up among Europeans could recognise the importance of this Òrìṣà and fight to preserve their cultural heritage, what excuse do those of us living here have? We cannot continue treating our culture as inferior just to appease foreign religions that were historically used as instruments of conquest, enslavement and exploitation against our ancestors. When will Africa truly become African again? You can read the Quran, which contains teachings you may find difficult to reconcile with modern human values, and still regard it as sacred. You can read the Bible, engage with passages that reflect historical misogyny and the acceptance of slavery, and still call it holy. So what exactly has our traditional faith done to deserve being labelled demonic? Yoruba traditional religion has its own history, philosophy, moral principles, cosmology and spiritual practices. Why should we automatically condemn it using standards that we rarely apply with the same intensity to foreign religions? This is a question both you and I must answer. You are African. You can never be more Muslim than the Arab, just as you can never be more Christian than the European. But you can certainly be African without being ashamed of your identity. Embracing our indigenous heritage does not require us to abandon our personal religious beliefs. It requires us to stop treating our own history, spirituality and civilisation as something inferior. Africa must learn to appreciate itself.

Capitalism is just a moderate word for exploitation. Inequality is evidently present in almost every part of our society. Some people cannot afford a meal, while others possess so much wealth that they cannot exhaust it in their lifetime. Some can afford multiple homes, while others cannot afford a single room. If capitalism at the domestic level can be this brutal, what do you think its international version looks like? For context, America arrested another country’s president then took control of their oil industry. Tell me, which African country has that kind of economic and geopolitical leverage? Africa has arguably been given one of the most difficult historical and developmental challenges. We inherited political and economic systems that were largely imposed on societies with different cultural, historical and institutional foundations. Aligning these systems with our realities requires decades of institutional development, political negotiation and social transformation. We are still dealing with the consequences of artificial colonial boundaries, unjustifiable amalgamation, the challenge of building national identities across diverse ethnic groups, weak institutions, economic dependency and an international system that often limits the extent to which developing countries can exercise sovereignty over their resources. There is simply so much we have to overcome. Our challenges are not exclusively domestic, they are also historical, structural and international. But the encouraging thing is that Africa is progressing, however slowly. Our institutions are evolving, our economies are changing, and our people are becoming increasingly conscious of the structural forces shaping our development. Africa will wake up. It is only a matter of time.