Definitions first: This article treats black inferiority as the factual reality where blacks everywhere including those in Africa are at the bottom of success – making blacks the inferior race.
Success on the other hand is defined as the ability of a society to adequately take care of the basic needs of its members – or rather, the physical, mental, and social well being of the said members. These basic needs include but are not limited to the needs to obtain food, prpoer shelter, healthcare, education, humanity (psychological, social and spiritual well-being), technological advancement, and philosophical fulfillment.
Going by those definitions, it is a fact that blacks are the inferior race. A lot of theories have been put forth attempting to explain why Africans are the Inferior Race; ranging from historical injustices, colonization, racial prejudices, religion, political structures, skin color, environmental conditions, and even genetics. By and large recent studies have ruled out skin color and genetics as contributing to black inferiority. Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips put it succinctly, ” despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual ability than whites”. but all the other mentioned factors have taken up significant share of the blame.
It is accepted that white privilege and racial prejudice has helped perpetuate poverty in Africa – firstly where the whites exploit the African continent of her rich resources, then throwing crumbs at her in form of aid. Secondly, the whites have been blamed for upholding an economic structure that is closed to blacks. For example, it is very difficult for a black entrepreneur to get an entrance in a predominantly white market. Thirdly what is white is considered of a higher quality – by blacks and whites alike. A black man (or woman) with some loose change will always run to possess a brand that is white produced – ranging from simple things like alcohol for Christmas festivities (white holiday) to high end considerations like home ownership. A black man will feel some level of achievement whenever he gets ownership of a brand made by whites. Explains why Kenya’s trade deficit is in trillions of shillings.
Those however are not the three reasons that demonstrate why Africans are the Inferior Race. My three reasons are related to behavior – behavior in as far as getting work done is concerned. The three reasons are documentation, thoroughness, and a combination of the two – laziness.
1. Documentation
From early last year I started watching a lot of documentaries on history of science and history of religion. The more I watched those documentaries, the more it became clearer that blacks played almost no part in creating the modern era. When I tried to dig deep to find out why this could be the case, what I got were a lot of excuses by the blacks.
The excuses included things like “the whites buried black history”, or “the white stole from blacks without giving credit”, or “the whites doctored the black history to portray black discoveries as discoveries done by whites”.
Amid all these excuses, there seemed to be none that points out on actual evidence of documents that were written by blacks then confisticated by whites at colonization. The common agreement is that blacks passed information from generation to generation via oral tradition. This is despite the fact that the art of writing was invented, or rather developed, in Egypt.
There was a time I had a debate with a friend over documentation. The friend was of the opinion that documentation was not necessary, but my take was that it is lack of documentation that made it impossible for blacks to progress as fast as other races technology wise. The reason for lack of documentation, as we both agreed after the debate, was because of black’s preference for secrecy, instead of sharing knowledge. This we easily saw by pointing out to the behaviors of traditional black doctors like my grandmother.
My grandmother has a ‘medical’ procedure for taking care of pregnant women, and even aiding them to easily give birth, but she will never share her procedure with anyone, lest they take the business away from her.
A traditional doctor in my village died sometime in early 2000s. At his deathbed is when he decided to share his medical knowledge with his preferred successor, but apparently he did not have enough time to pass the entire information, making it impossible for his successor to succeed as a traditional healer. Now extrapolate these behaviors – that of my grandmother and of this village doctor – to the thousands of others who lived in the precolonial era. That’s before we take into account the errors associated with transmission of information through oral traditions.
Lack of documentation in ancient Africa has made us adopt a culture where we hate documentation, both formally and informally. How many of us keep detailed diaries of our daily lives? I don’t. When reading through the lives and times of famous whites; the scientists, engineers, politicians – you will always hear that their biographies were based on diaries they kept. Do you have your diaries that can one day be used to recreate your lives as black Africans? If you were to write a biography of any famous dead African, you’d probably base your writing on publicly available knowledge, not his diary.
A friend told me of his encounter with this white hawker in Nairobi – a hawker who kept detailed records of his hawking business. How many black small business operators keep any form of records for his business. When I opened my retail shop back in 2012, I provided books for record keeping. A few months down the line, no one was writing anything sensible in those books. I should take the blame, but one thing that’s true is, it is next to impossible to teach old dogs new tricks.
In September this year I had to write this about documentation, ” Even in 21st century, there are businesses, particularly in Africa, that still operate without keeping books of accounts – even when others are already doing cloud accounting. These businesses mostly fall in the cadre of micro and small enterprises that we Kenyans normally term as either mama mboga or hawkers. And this is what differentiate us Africans from the rest of the world. It is the single most important aspect of our culture that makes us always lie at the bottom of progress ladder. We hate keeping records.”
Without proper documentation you cannot expect technological advancement, you cannot expect to leapfrog from inferior race tag to equality or superiority . It has been said that traditional black doctors could perform Caesarean Section with crooked tools. Now, due to lack of documentation, this procedure disappeared in oblivion, forget the possibility of any improvement on the archaic methods used on those CS procedures. Imagine if they documented their processes; then the next generation could have improved on those processes, documented the improvements, then the next generation after that could have refined those improvements, and so forth and so forth – until by the time the colonists were coming to Africa, they could have found a highly advanced medical system to learn from.
2. Thoroughness
The short and to the point definition of thoroughness is ” great care and attention to detail”. This is thoroughly hinged on documentation. You have to document your process first before you can realistically be thorough about it. A black man is of an inferior race because a black African doesn’t want to be thorough – rather, a short cut will work any time.
I don’t even want to talk about the shortcuts that lead to collapsed buildings, or roads that wear out in two years – or the shortcuts that make us produce those third-class products no one wants to own. Those are obvious. I want to talk about lack of thoroughness we opt for when doing project management, and allow me to use a particular filmmaking process to illustrate.
When you watch an action movie – a scene where two or more characters are involved in exchange of blows and kicks, you may think that the Director just had those actors randomly fight each other – well, because it looks so chaotic. No. Those chaos are meticulously planned.
A black and particularly an African filmmaker will want to have actors throw punches randomly at each other then capture as many takes as possible, then try to create something out of the chaos during the editing stage. That’s not how the process works.
A fight scene must be choreographed, the same way a dance choreography is done. The Director, The Director of Photography, The Stunt Coordinator, The Editor and The Actors must know beforehand the types of fights that will be shot, the number of movements, from small moves like a throwing a punch or ducking from a punch, to more complex movements like flying up then falling down after a kick. All these movements must be pre visualized, written down, drawn in storyboards, shot listed; then they must be rehearsed, several times, until the actors naturally masters them the same way a dance crew will master every dance move.
It doesn’t matter whether the fight scenes involve only two people, or 200 people. Each move must be planned for, choreographed, rehearsed, then shot. Camera angles must be rehearsed too.
Such thoroughness in planning and execution is what we lack. Ask any African filmmaker of the amount of planning they engage in during pre production stage of filmmaking process, then compare that to the amount of planning done by the white owned studios, and you will find a discrepancy of 1 to 1000. That is, if an African plans anything, then the white man does that a 1000 times over.
In the filmmaking process, the planning starts right from the screenplay. The movie Iron Man was planned for for 10 years before production. Gemini Man spent 20 years in the development stage alone, and Avatar was planned for then waited for the technology to mature in order to shoot it in 3D.
An African hates planning, and he hates being thorough so much more. He loves shortcuts, and that’s why his products are third class. That’s why his cities will congested within years of existence, get flooded, and become foundations for slums to spring up – his roads wear out in six months, and his buildings will collapse, year after year, killing occupants without care. Because of lack of thoroughness, they attribute road accidents to witchcraft. One of the items in the latest BBI report is that we do not have a long term plan for Kenya.
But even on the occasions when we have plans, we do not want the plans to be thorough. If we were thorough in our planning process, we could not have the need to be calling for a constitutional overhaul hardly 10 years after adopting the 2010 constitution. Whenever there are plans then they are rushed. The rushed plans themselves are rushed in implementation. Our love for shortcuts explains why Africans top the list of the most corrupt countries year after year; and explains why Africans are still the Inferior Race.
3. Laziness
This is basically the summary of the first two points. We are lazy so we hate the process of documentation. I’m not going to go round and round to explain just how lazy Africans are, but I will lift a quote from Tatenda Gwaambuka who wrote a piece in 2017 titled Uncomfortable Truths: Are Africans lazy? “From my observations, I have seen a lot more white people with an admirable working ethic than I have fellow blacks. This is no factual finding backed by statistical truths but the sentiment is echoed by how I see my fellows attempting to avoid companies or institutions which belong to fellow black people because of fear of poor service and excuses. In Zimbabwe, we call them “Museyamwa businesses” and these are not half as organised as they should be. They will churn out excuse after excuse for not delivering especially if the client pays before service is rendered.”
4. Cry babies
Africans don’t want to recognize that what makes them an inferior race is laziness, lack of documentation, and the love for shortcuts. Instead, they want to point fingers to white privilege, historical injustices, and the continual exploitation by the whites. They, by and large, want the whites to hand them the silver spoon in a silver platter.
Blacks in their stupidity do not want to realise that this a jungle, and in today’s era, the fittest to survive are those who have the power of the pen. The whites realized this long ago, and that’s why when they came to Africa the first thing they did was to write a history that reflects their superiority. A black man may cry that the white man did not properly document the black history – but for what white good could a white man shower the oral oriented black idiot with praises? How was that going to benefit Europe?
Several years after independence we are still here crying over the effects of colonization, instead of recognising the importance of documentation, thoroughness, and hardwork. We are still hear crying how the white man is exploiting our black resources, instead of figuring out how we by ourselves can not only stop the exploitation, but turn around to exploit those resources ourselves without having to rely on the white economy.
Go online and you’ll see a lot of literature blaming the whites for the state of black’s poor performance in the progress ladder – as if the whites owe the blacks any apology. This is a jungle and the fittest are meant to survive in it. The next human race is likely to be Homo technologicus – tell me which black country is preparing to have her children be part of this future human race – or we are still here begging for the whites to always come to our aid whenever we have food shortage. Even the single fact that we are beggars should offer vivid explanation as to why we are the inferior race.
Also check out: The myopia with which Kenyan Journalists approach stories show just how inept we as Kenyans are
And another one: Kenyan Bloggers should rise up to the occasion and tell the Kenyan story in depth