When you try to be a pseudo-Caucasian you are creating a rod for your own back

By Ayo Akinfe 

(1) Today is June 30. On this day in 1936, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie asked the League of Nations for sanctions against Italy after they occupied the country. This was in response to Italy’s murderous conduct during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War that began on 3 October 1935. Italy used mustard gas against the Ethiopians

(2) It was also on this day in 1914 that Mahatma Gandhi's was first arrested after campaigning for Indian rights in South Africa

(3) On June 30 1860, there was also a famous debate on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution held at the Oxford University Museum and dominated by arguments between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce

(4) In all these cases, people were struggling to establish their identity and seeking to get the rest of the world to appreciate them as fully fledged human beings and equals 

(5) As you are all aware, the African has simply not been appreciated as a fully fledged homo sapien. Mahatma Ghandi for instance did not oppose apartheid, he just wanted Indians excluded from it. For him, it was right to subjugate the African Kaffir but the Asiatic was a proper human who should enjoy the same status as Caucasians 

(6) For me, we will never be treated as proper humans as long as we seek to be replica Caucasians. We cannot rubbish and abandon our culture, religious beliefs and traditions and then expect the rest of the world to accept us as equals 

(7) When I look at the incidences of rape and sexual misconduct levelled against African clergymen I ask if we did not bring all this upon ourselves. When we abandon religious beliefs that served us perfectly well for centuries in favour of the ways of the European colonisers, did we not create a rod for our own backs?

(8) Are Africans for instance designed to be monogamous? If our forefathers fancied a young woman, they just married her as a bride and she was integrated into their household. There was not once incidence of rape in Things Fall Apart that African bible and neither have we heard of any such crime among the Koma people of Adamawa State 

(9) African women must have larger hips then everyone else for a reason. It may be that we are designed to procreate more, so all this Catholic celibacy is simply a no no for us. Nobody has been able to explain why we should abandon polygamy that served our forefathers brilliantly in favour of these new beliefs that result in young women being raped by clergymen and abused by religious leaders who take advantage of them 

(10) I find it perplexing that it never occurred to us to copy the colonisers’ marine prowess, technological advancements, stone constructions or industrial masterplans but alas, we bought their faiths hook, line and sinker. We simply went for the easy option that requires no intellectual input. When you do that, you must learn to live with the consequences