UNDERSTANDING BACKWARDNESS IN AFRICA AND ESWATINI IN PARTICULAR
Introduction
Africa has not been inherently backward, the backwardness was engineered. It is important to note that Africa has had one of the oldest civilisations. Examples include the Great Zimbabwean, Timbuktu, KMT, Axum, and Ethiopian civilisations to name but a few.
I do not intend to be poetic but want as a people we have to remember the waxing and the waning of empires fortunes leaving their mark in the traces of our forgetful hearts. Let us look within to find these lost realities as we move forward to reclaim our greatness. But to do so we may have to search deeply.
Do we not feel the stirring of something unsleeping? Let’s silence our minds and let our souls resonate in harmony with past moments of days: of trade caravans 300 camels long: of the thrill of casting a glance upon the founding of the pyramids: as the battle cry of victory rings in our ears; of our joy as we gather the harvest on the great day of celebration; as our sons take their place amongst the warriors of the village.
That beacon that blazes in the stillness of our essence was lit from the fires of yesteryear. And with it - at last we realize - we can never relinquish a tie with our roots forged by the ancestors themselves. Let’s open ourselves to re-live the wonders - of African Civilisations!
"African civilization is not measured by the heights of tall buildings but by the quality of human relations," Alik Shahadah.
In terms of civilisations Africa was first. Europeans have been firm in holding up themselves as creators of civilization: That only when people left Africa did civilization come into existence. This is done by doing exactly what the Romans did before, by defining civilization to include their traits, habits, and defining everyone else's on the outside.
It is worth noting that civilisation defined by the conqueror is suspect. According to Aunkh, who used to work for NASA, he told us in a workshop that the world map in this age of white domination has been reduced in scale.
Thus Afrika is supposed to be the other way around. The shape that North Africa is given, is actually South Africa's real shape. On another note Credo Mutwa once said... "Egypt was here in South Africa. The land known as Kemet is South Africa. The pharaohs were here." This is backed up by many hieroglyphics found in South African caves.
Credo also carried the artefacts of ancient Kemet. The Pharaoh's ankh and necklace. In Mpumalanga there is what you call the Kemet stone calendar called "inzalo yelanga" commonly known as Adam's calendar, the same one that exists in Egypt.
Archeologist Michael Tellinger confirms that this is the oldest man made structure. Mutwa states that South Africa has the most mysteries in the whole world. There are various Stone sites in SA called Simmulacra meaning rocks that look like humans.
These rocks were manipulated by humans to look like human beings. If you've seen the so called Lions head in Cape Town. You will notice that this is actually a Sphinx, especially from a bird’s eye view, one can see the whole body of this lion. There is the Venda Stone, and the Ten Commandments. South Africa is indeed full of mystery.
The Venda Stone is also known as the ‘The Talking Stone’. But wait... There's more, a mummy was exhumed in Kouga in the Eastern Cape. The mummy was then taken to the Grahamstown Museum. The Khosi-San are still fighting the museum for the return of their Mummy.
Thus, one of the main reasons we struggle to see the connections between other parts of Africa and Kemet is due to the toxic effects of colonization. During Europe´s invasion of Africa, the oppressors made sure to destroy all elements that could remind Africans of who they really were.
The art was similar, the spiritual practices were identical, and even the clothing and hairstyle were similar to what could be found in Kemet. Today it seems impossible but when we find ancient pictures or drawings of West, central, east and Southern Africans, their cultural practices, and buildings, the truth starts to appear.
Africa was connected, and people used to migrate for numerous reasons. So before we go into the question about Africa’s backwardness we will have to look at the real definition of civilisation and why we have fallen into the trap of defining things according to the way the oppressors and colonisers do.
What do we mean by civilisation?
Africa as things stand is being slaughtered, she is at the altar and is being isolated from knowledge, development and progress much like a slaughtered sheep. That is why everything big happening in Africa is being decimated. Civilisation is being defined to Africa by the conqueror.
One writer once said that ‘until the lion learn how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.’ Wars are tearing Africa apart, AIDS is raging like wild fire through out the plains and valleys of Africa and recently we have been living under the spell of COVID 19.
All this is part of the arsenal of murder that is being employed by the multilateral organisations and so called advanced nations to bring about Africa’s destruction as a race.
We have to think deeply as so called ‘progressives’ that in the process of Africa’s destruction and her people where were we? What role did we play to stop this destruction? What role did we play to dig deep and protect Africa and its knowledge and history?
One particularly atrocious crime for which we must not forgive the people of Europe is that whenever they write about the people of Africa they deliberately separate us. They treat the ones they talk about as if they were not part and parcel of the African continent at all.
Nowhere is this more evident than when European scientists talk about Egypt. They deal with the Egyptians as if Egyptians were a totally separate race from the rest of Africa, and yet anyone who knows Africa well will tell you that Africa is interconnected.
That the various people of our Mother land are interconnected as are the gears and flywheels of a clock, and to see the people of Egypt apart from the rest of Africa is a fraud, a delusion, a crime. The people of Egypt were an African people, not at all removed from those in Nubia, Ethiopia and in those African regions far to the South of Egypt.
It is important to note that in our quest for liberation we have to gradually discover our lost history as blacks and especially as Africa. This is part and parcel of waging our struggle to dethrone the tinkhundla aristocracy we must reconnect as Africa and fight a common struggle for putting Africa as a player in the global arena on our footing and agenda.
If we cannot unpack our common history we cannot forge a common destiny. So, what do we mean by civilisation? When talking about civilisation we have to be careful because there is no one type of civilisation and also civilisation is not linear.
Social scientist have tended to take a linear, one sided, uncritical view in defining civilisation as if it has one rallying point. In essence, civilisation is not only a concept at the cultural level or in the cultural field, but a comprehensive social concept.
Thus, civilisation is closely related to ‘progress’, and itself means progress. Therefore, the concept of civilisation is equivalent to social progress. The biggest problem in attempting to respond to the question is to use definitions of the oppressors and narrow ourselves into these definitions and think that therefore is not civilised or has never been civilised.
In our definitions we are ahistorical and non-dialectic and we think that civilisation is linear. Thus, in the face of complex and a changeable world in our attempts to define civilisation we need a guidance which is historical and dialectical in nature.
We have to understand civilisation itself, the goal of civilisation, the historical process and requirements of the development of civilisation, the laws and roads of the development of civilisation and the exchanges between and spread of civilisations.
This approach can assist us as it is comprehensive and has immense value for society. Before we look at eSwatini we will be generic and look at generally the historical development of society and before we dive there we have to be careful when looking at history as postmodernism has relegated history into a meaningless and inexplicable series of random events or accidents.
It looks at history as if it governed by no laws that we can comprehend. In modern academic circles there is the notion that disputes the concept of higher and lower forms of development and culture and this denial of progress in history is characteristic of decadent phase of capitalist development.
So, we must never think that history is just a meaningless and inexplicable series of random events or accidents lest we fall into the same trap of analysis characteristic of the psychology of the bourgeoisie in this phase of capitalist decline.
Any system at its demise tends to be alarmist and seek to obliterate everything in history which opposes its existence. Under capitalism especially this era rampant capitalism where the progress of the system is reaching its limits and threatens to go in reverse, history is obliterated, and the only civilisation becomes the development of industrial capitalism.
Lenin once observed that a man at the edge of a cliff does not reason as this can be shown by what is happening to the Palestinians in the Gaza. The big guys, the Uncle Sam’s always want to feed us their reality, their own definitions and justify that they are the last bastion of progress. They want to pose as if progress started and will end with their cultural domination, known as cultural imperialism.
NB: This is part I of part III