Journal Article

Remembering The Dismembered Continent

Armah, Ayi Kwei

2015

Overview

The argument of this essay is that in our historical behavior, we the people of African have tended to regard the continent - all of it - as our home; that regimes imposed by invaders, from Europe to Arabia, have attempted to configure African space and in ways beneficial to themselves, cutting off important portions of our space and time, in the expectation that only a residual portion could be acknowledged as ours that under the European fragmentation of African space and time formalized in Berlin in 1885, the residual fragment was further subdivided into separate plantationstyle colonies, the same truncated units we are now invited to identify with, rebranded as our nation-states; that these divisive units, the colonial states, based on the dismemberment of Africa, serve purposes that invariable degrade African life while enhancing European wellbeing; and that the completion of the unfinished business of our political, social, economic, and cultural emancipation depends on our scrapping the Berlin design in favor of unitary African design; that this task is complicated because of physical, military and administrative dismemberment of Africa was consolidated by a colonial culture that programmed our ruling elite to recognize the divisive configuration of African space and time as its sole reality, with the result that we identify with our divisions in our actual behavior, even while proclaiming in rhetoric our undying attachment to Pan-African unity; that this behavior is deeply anchored in a lethal indoctrination alias formal education that hooks African intellectuals on the false but incessantly repeated notion that Africa has no intelligent history, no rational philosophical culture, and that therefore, to progress into modernity, Africa must keep stroking the psychic strings tying us to Europe by borrowing something called Western rationality; that this colonial ideology, quite apart from being demonstrably false, is also soporific, mentally sedative, and lethal; that if we are to wake from its spell and remake our society and our continent, Africans will have to retrieve our suppressed ability to conceive of our wholeness in both spatial and temporal terms; that we can begin doing this by articulating our dismembered society and remembering our suppressed history, philosophy, culture, science and arts; that for this awakening, all necessary intellectual information exists here and now, though in scattered form; that it required the work of groups of determined researchers to bring it together, to process it, and to make it widely available in forms accessible to all - these being the requisite preparations for African's intellectual awakening.

• Publisher: Institute of African American Affairs
• Subject: Borrowing / Culture / Egyptian civilization / Ideology / Philosophy / Politics / Rhetoric / Society / Space / Time