The most essential imported intangible tool the imperialists took to Africa was their culture. When the Westerners arrived in Africa, they were poor but used their culture and still continue to do so to drive their clandestine ambitions. They enrich themselves by taking even from the street beggars and impoverished the whole continent the scars of which are still very transparent and hardly will they be gone, forgotten or forgiven. They have left Africans in the most primitive stage of “handy people”.
When Westerners arrived in Africa, they first penetrated the local cultures by association and assimilation and later conquered them both mentally and physically. African were first made to believe their gods were inferior compared to the Western gods and from then Western intellects were tirelessly worshiped and Western culture triumphed even in the most remote places most of the times. Even in the most remote villages of The Gambia, hungry angry villagers will have I-Pads in their hands regardless to the knowledge of how to use them. They are happier with Western prestige than their own defining customs and traditions. This agony of western civilization got almost every African at the throat, chanting for freedom with mouths closed.
Culture as lenses of perception, as a way of looking at reality and as a world-view has left Africa and Africans in the dustbin equating with themselves and emulating those outside their borders. Africans have begun to change their minds to what might have cursed the early death of their children but they are still battling with whether their own civilization is best suited for them. Even though Charles Darwin might have made a lot of wrong scientific assumptions, one that has left the western powers naked was his assertion that Africa is the curdle of mankind. I am not myself a fan of Charles Darwin, however, well after he was gone, archaeologists had found the assertion correct. And since no scientific findings other than that of those done on the African soil can prove that the earliest man and woman to have ever lived in this world come from another continent, Africa is still the beginning and Africa and Africans must be worshiped for that sacred history of producing people from leaves and branches of trees in the tropical forest to the savannah regions and now in all advanced forms dispersed all over the world. This culture as lenses of perception and an approach to looking at reality is now in a tempting disguise to many African and the world’s reality of Africa is not only biased but totally dumbfounding to even those who cook and produce those baseless results of regarding Africans as barbaric and therefore, uncivilized.
It will be fruitless to argue why African cultures are not embraced by the West if we know African History. What astonished me personally is why Africans continue to scratch the backs of their own enemies. I deliberately used the word “enemy” because I do not have a choice and what to say things as they are. Westerners do not only killed the talent and corrupted the efforts and spirits of Africans, they, first of all, rubbed them of everything that will let them flourish and now labelled them as scavengers. As an African, I lost hope of a Westernised Africa but I am pretty sure that Africans will continue to be Africans so long as they continue to be motivated by their own cultures and wisdom. Africa is the richest continent in human history but might be the last to be recognised so in as long as the wimps of the West continue to dictate our cultural dances. We are the beginning and probably the last intellectuals to ever embraced this earth, however, hardly are African intellectuals recognised worldwide. Even African wisdom have become strange and if they must be used, it most follow the Western ways and meanings. We have a fragile intellectual property right under whose canopy, African wisdoms and knowledge lies under the interpretation and safety of western scholars and thus signifies the powerlessness structure of African knowledge. I am sure this predicament began from the free borders of Africa, where every visitor is warmly welcome and because of our non-combat nature of democracy and wellbeing, visitors could effortlessly get away with everything. When these evil Western imperialists found no security bordering Africa, they easily penetrated and the indigenous Africans allow them to settle as brothers and sisters but failed to give them their limitations and as a result, they have robbed off the merciful blind Africa of her prestige and worth. Now Africa is in a state of transitions while other continents strive to reach the moon, we try to settle our civil wars under our helpless tenements.
Africa geographically not the closest to the West but might perhaps be undergoing the fastest westernization anywhere in this world. Why this paradox? Slavery and colonialism have all erode the African culture and history in their different ways though not necessarily comparable. The former was done to enrich the capitalist ambition toward accumulation in Britain and in the new world where Africans were seen to be more physically adaptive to the bad climate and weather conditions than Indian slaves who could not survived the brunt. Africans slaves were perceived as animals with the strongest muscles and the ceaseless energy reserve to produce more raw materials for the industries in Britain and other parts of Europe respectively. Black Africans were deliberately chosen over all the other races and that Africa as a continent was not the closest to Europe and the new world (later to be called America) and it was not economically and security wise convenient to cross miles in the Mediterranean to reach the “dark world”. However, it was because Africans were perceived to be lower human beings and good for any adventure of such. And even though slavery was later abolished, it was because slavery was no more profitable for capitalism and not because they were equated as human beings with rights and brains as their masters. The former catastrophe was neither good nor short. Colonialism was under way. After slavery was discussed among the capitalist powers to be unbeneficial anymore, they later consider it illegal but never paid a compensation to those broken bones and minds rather it was to be followed by another form of slavery- colonialism. The lowest estimated period said by conservative historian was two centuries of brute colonialism of the African people. When world powers meet in Berlin to invade, colonize, occupy, and annex Africa, first they had to legitimize their urges. For the scramble to be effective and efficient they had to intellectually share a drawing table to avoid conflicts among themselves in their ways to their first imperial mission. They unanimously agreed it was profitable and that it was also easy to conquer armless people and drive home African natural resources. However, the mission was just more than depriving Africans off their resources, it was also to introduce and compelled on them as a last resort foreign cultures which will later define Africans into either English, French, or Portuguese speaking people. This new way of life buried the local ways of education, religion and civilization. In short the primitive socialization know to the indigenous Africans was no more followed. From then on, the bones of identity, and the integrity of Africanism was put into a hot Western soup and Africans were finally disintegrated “not to be united anymore”. These two evil forces – slavery and colonialism- coming one after the other respectively still continue to define the descent African people in the 21st century – a century that is supposed to be coloured by democracy, modernity and freedom from vices. Yet the gravest from of all Western cruelty are captured within their constructed boundaries and cultures in Africa. The African view of looking at reality has underground a fundamental change from battling with the enemy to battling with self. There, might not be any transparent form of Western slavery or colonialism but Africa and Africans inhabit Western cultures and institutions that continue to define their lives. This might be called neo-colonialism where African brothers and sisters are stratified and ostracised into Gambians, Nigerians or Kenyans and the list goes on. These shifts in Western scientific paradigm are considered new civilization in Africa.
This Western cultural revolution as part of their imperial motives has left African semi-Africans and semi-Westerners. Also, it must be said that Africans easily capitulates to the aggressive Western civilization because of Western scientific thoughts and missionary Christian schools. The new mathematics, science and religion in the churches and later in the city centres, had made the conversion and surrendering of Africans easier. Science and religion are both forms of looking at reality but not necessary incompatible. Those missionary schools would not have succeeded without accompanying their instructions with scientific thoughts to kick out the old weak gods of the indigenous. Carries of Christianity were also carries of western civilization anywhere in Africa. Therefore, colonized black Africans have to contend with both. Science with religion has tormented African cultures and paradigms of seeing things their own ways.
Islam was also another foreign religion unknown to Africa but it was more merciful than Christianity since carriers of Islam to Africa never attempted to loot no do they ever take political offices. The history of Islam was much more kind and localized.
The god of African traditions was often brave but that of Christianity urge you to turn the other check. At the end of the feminine virtue of Christianity; passion, compassion, forgiveness, and kindness to even the evil have made the conversion of African easier and speedier. Courage, manhood, bravery and even purposeful ruthlessness towards the enemy which was known of African traditions, all disappeared into thin air. Western Christianity later turned the cheek from the theology of conversion to that of liberation.
The second importance of culture is that it serves as a form of evaluation, good and bad, right and wrong, ugly and beautiful, attitudes to marriage, sex and gender, regulations and policies and so on. But rather than following African cultures on this matters of great concern, Africans dance to the tune of what is defined by Westerns. We read Western, understand Western, pray Western and even dance Western. Africans are now made to entertain nude girls and boys in the streets of Banjul, Nairobi and Lagos but cannot entertain nude pictures in commercialized literature in the cities.
Africans generally enjoy more heterosexual life than Westerners but they enjoy less homosexual permissiveness. What is clear as in law, and in morality and this is profoundly influencing African cultural evolution is homosexuality. Parallel standards but differently entertained.
The third function of culture is motivation; he balance between individual interest and the pursuit for collective welfare. In Africa, you are fist motivated to achieve your basic needs and second the needs for your immediate family and the society as a whole. The other imperative was the pursuit for personal advancement beyond basic needs and then that of the extended family beyond their collective needs.
Some principles of collectivism has shifted to be subordinated for personal profit. The profit motive for prestige borrowed from the West. The prestige motive is part of the traditional collectivism for the common wellbeing of the society but now even African nuclear family members fight each other for luxurious dwelling and evil processions from Nigeria to Ghana, in The Gambia as in Kenya, from Zambia as in Mali, from Senegal to Guinea. This personal prestigious ambition has seriously disintegrated the African cultural bond.
Our nest function of culture will be culture as a basis of stratification. Instead of classes immerging from who owns what, it follows the line of who knows what. The knowledge of imperial languages change the African reality both from the Marxist sense of materialism and that of African normative sense. Western conquering forces follow the lines of influence and then affluence to conquer. You must first have the competence of more than just counting numbers or formulating short sentences to a good command over an imperial language before you find yourself a white colour job in any African high office. For any Westernized and semi-westernized African to be able to read Das-Capital he must have had gone a greater western civilization. No African Marxist had ever been accepted into any Western university directly coming from a village compound. That has a lot to say.
As for the role of production and distribution, western influence carry with them cultural shortcomings. Consumptions patterns changed from one fruit for each to more than one basket for each influencing more inequality within an already overpopulated poor population. The creation of new capitalist industries has greatly penetrated the African culture of collective aspiration for common wellbeing. It has allowed Africans to see no harm in personal selfish ambitions to enrich oneself and occupy the others. Africans from then began to breath in the unknown evil in biting all others in any way possible. This has led to the unsupportable urbanization giving growing gust towns and villages in the rural settlements augmented by dictatorial leaderships sending most African youths to their untimely graves.
Capitalism itself has further eroded African scholarship and collective life. In terms of common ambition for the natural and common being of all, Africans are now spending millions on birthdays parties and flamboyant life styles. Many African women do not have sanitary pads but have one or two mobile phones which they lack the knowledge to use.
The last but not lest function of culture is identity. This helps to define the "we and the they". Another impact westernization has deepened into the bone marrows of Africans is the identity of tribes as the new people scramble in new territories for accumulation. The identity of nation states as Africans take pride in identifying themselves as Kenyans, Nigerians, Gambians and so on acknowledging the colonial boundaries and identifications and the deepening of self-bastardization.
