The geographical location of our news outfit does not diminish the primary concern of our editorial on what is happening in the African continent, and this month without lapsing into blissful sentimentality, it was time to face the truth. Why Africa seems to be defined by others who make it rain or shine as it please. Why this land, the cradle of humanity seems to always be the one feeling the counter effects from other civilization, while it is the mother of civilizations; as it is true we do not say it enough "who controls Africa controls the world." It is a truth of palisse to say that Western expansion was made on the back of the black continent. Today While Africa is in the center of all desires, becoming the experimental theater of a whole amalgam of harmful precepts, ranging from all-out impoverishment of populations with deteriorating terms of trade, to terrorist nebulas and epidemics that could not be more suspicious. It would be a crime by association for any news organization that respects itself, to adopt the code of silence about the real reasons for the shocking situation Africa is facing. For ages freedom of conscience and action has always been the basis of social progress. If the people of Africa have always resisted Western penetration that seemed to bring more harm than good, the end of slavery and the intensification colonization in the late 19th century with the Berlin Conference on the partition of Africa, had sounded rather the beginning of the era of neo slavery. Alas, despite the passing centuries the African continues to have difficulty understanding that a system of oppression remains one, whatever the noble clothes it might wear, so the civilizing missions, truncated auto determinations and the imposition of democracy and good governance in the 90s are the various aspect of the doctrine of submission to the Western ideal, an ideal that despite its whiff of good will nonetheless hides a clear determination of absolute control over a populace which over time has forgotten his bearings, undergoing the battering blow of the counter African-culture through all existing and imaginable means. The colonial administration Who will be fought after the Second World War by the Africans who were beginning to be fed up to be told what to do, in their internal matter by these people with pale skin they had seen, suffer and die like them in the great battles that ravaged Europe, would lead to the demystification of the white colonist. This demystification would sound the death knell for the blind submission of the black people against those who remained perfect strangers to them. The paradigm of faith often readily admits that one has more fervor in the belief in God mostly because it remain an enigma. The journey of the African Expeditionary Force in Europe during the two world wars would break this taboo and gradually the ideas of ​​freedom would make their way into the African community before reaching a critical level in the sixties. Without questioning the courage and fervor of the people who worked struggled hard to be freed from the Western yoke with mixed success, it is however important to recognize once and for all that the independent approach was a failure. A failure intimately linked to the socio cultural tools used. Ultimately African independence given by the western power, were a change in submission style, and it is important today to admit that both in its radical forms inspired by Marxism or moderate including a tutelage partnership with the West, there never would have been true independence from the outset, since the fight used the weapons of the white man, they wanted to fight. And weapons the latter knew better handle than the leaders of these peoples, which usually were in the Western school. It’s barely plausible trivially to see two Africans leaders fighting for independence send telegraph cables in French, through a telegraph company managed by the French colonial administration to be successful to remain a secret, yet they are proven facts that show that it happened and this could only be lethally detrimental to the attempt to plot against the colonial order. Whether Populist Party rooted in Marxist doctrine as the Congolese National Movement of Patrice Lumumba, the UPC of Cameroon with Ruben Um Nyobe, Kwame Nkrumah’s convention people party or moderate and assimilationist parties such as the African Democratic Rally of Houphouet Boigny, it was simply a transposition of the communist and capitalist ideology. The battle between the two blocs would simply find another theater of operations in Africa, to the chagrin of all; Africa once again was to pay the price of imported ideologies, imposed, through his sons who attended the white man schools. From this perspective it is clear that African politics played in a court that was not his, and therefore could only suffer the dictates of one side or the other. If the Marxist-Leninist parties had won on the continent it is almost certain that countries of the Sub Saharan Africa would simply had become satellite country of the communist bloc. When one thinks about what was the Soviet Union in the management of fundamental liberties, independence would have been a simple view of the mind. In this paragon a recurring question should impose itself in the struggle for African freedom, where is the African ideology? How could you seek freedom, when at the same time you engage in a subservient relationship towards a camp at the expense of the other, although a camp seemed to offer more guarantees on certain points, it was no less a conditioned freedom , which sooner or later would have disserved the interests of the African people as seems to prove the current situation of the continent where the ideology of the West Bloc, seems to have more followers, plunging into a vile chaos of generations Africans who well into the 21 century still do not know, and have more or less no idea of what their legitimate aspirations should be, since in Africa, peoples continue to define themselves in relation to what the West thinks of itself. Also the outcome of the democracy discourse de la Baule, by the late French President François Mitterrand has become the exhilaration of new time, while in Africa since immemorial time there have been more appropriate systems to manage peoples and community affairs. Such as the Kurugan Fuga Charter (1236) of the Mandinka people of the Mali Empire in the 13th century which already gave the right to vote to women recognizing at the same time their ability to exercise an executive function in the management of city affairs, in the Article 16, the Charter states: "Women, in addition to their daily occupations, must be involved in all our governments." These rights will only be granted to Western women 7 centuries later in the 30s of the 20th century. Unfortunately this system and many other governing African lives will be lost in an almost permanent oblivion under pressure from the erosive forces such as colonization, imported religions and extraversion behavior imposed by Western culture that has significant resources to spread its ideals. Also this old democracy of several centuries, that Africa experienced some form before the West is only one among many other stratagems to continue to have a continuous interference in African affairs, a nice idea that unfortunately some forces are able to use to achieve their most skittish design, social splits and human tragedies such as Rwanda in 1994, came to remind Africans once again, that the curse of the division had been thrown on their families to strip them better. In a complex reality when talking about a return to African identity of some principles, the fiercest defenders of a certain order seems to see in this ideal, a simple fable, accusing the perpetrators of this deed, ungodly peoples who enjoy the progress of Western technology and dare however taxing the west of negative entity. Those assimilationist agents forget that, technological progress is the heritage of humanity and does not belong to any race or group of individuals. It is a case of all because even in reality some of the most unexpected inventions have often been the preserve of a group of individuals that has often been taxed inept wrongly. It the same for knowledge and education which have no color , even better if we take into account the fact that the first universities were African ( Ancient Egypt – Mali Timbuktu), the Conventional illiteracy of some, is only delaying tactics of the proponents of an established order. Therefor in a global order that has a certain view of the world dominated by one thought, it’s the West that invents and the rest of the world populace applies the principles dictated to them. Unfortunately it's the same logic that for ages prevents the development of the world, exerting extreme segregation in the flow of information and knowledge, while applying social Darwinism that relegates some segment of the world population to simply survive, in spite of live and grow to self-determination. furthermore if some believe that it is through economic independence that Africa will snatch its full independence, it is paramount to admit in the same vein that The revolts rooted in the cultural identity of African people have always been the most difficult to curb by the colon, since the Ewondo revolt (Omgba Bitsogo) in de late 19th century in Cameroon against German occupation, the Maji Maji rebellion of 1906-1907 in East Africa against the same German Empire, to the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s, against the British Empire, it’s easy henceforth to understand that it’s through the cultural revolution that the African, will regain its freedom to be itself so to think without prejudice and to move towards an suitable result.

By Hubert Marlin Elingui Jr. Journalist Writer