THE story of the remaining three quarters of the 21st century will be the phoenix-like rise of the Third World.

A key part of this new beginning will be the development of a new pan-Africanist movement to end what is increasingly being labelled as the 500 years of exploitation and humiliation faced by people of African descent.

It will also be an indispensable cog in the machinery that will build a new multilateral world.

Many in Africa are not waiting around for other people to define what that new pan-Africanism should look like. They are busily getting on with defining it and building it for themselves.

But it will include regaining our lost or even forbidden culture as people of African descent.

The problem many of us observing this have is access to real information on our cultural heritage unfiltered by the lens of Western eyes.

We have to work hard to try to identify what is really happening on the continent and to weave our way through the litany of misinformation deliberately spread by parts of the mainstream corporate media at the behest of the ruling class.

Many in Africa have simply decided to move beyond the flag independence that has dogged much of Africa since so-called independence from the brutal colonial rulers that simply continued to rape and pillage Africa for everything they could get out of it.

The self-appointed “masters of the universe” have made it clear that as Africans flee the poverty and famine caused by their exploiters they would rather see us dying in the Mediterranean Sea or English Channel rather than make it to the more prosperous nations.

Lines were drawn across maps of the continent by the colonial rulers that divided people of the same languages and cultures.

It means that there are many Africans on the continent who are far more able to speak to other Africans in the languages of the oppressor colonialists rather than their own heritage tongue.

Of course many of us of African descent across the diaspora have no idea what our heritage tongue is because the vast majority of us have no knowledge of our ancestral lineage.

Legendary revolutionary leader from Guinea Bissau Amilcar Cabral stressed the importance of the cultural component of imperialism.

He said: “History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people.

“But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organised repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.

“For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order to contest foreign domination.”

The importance of African culture is far more than being able to dress in dashikis or having the know-how to cook the foods that are popular on the continent.

It is a revolutionary act to rebel against the dominant culture within the belly of the beast as well as the Eurocentric culture pushed on those still within the mother continent.

As Cabral said: “The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated.”

He added: “Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies.”

I do not pretend to be a cultural scholar of any kind but as I get older I do feel instinctively drawn to wanting to know more about my ancestry — who they were, what they did and how they did it.

I know my maternal heritage is to the Tikar people who can be found in what the colonialists labelled Cameroon. I have yet to discover my paternal heritage.

But I do understand that culture is a complex matter wherever one is in the world and no less so in Africa.

Cabral said that “from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly.

“It is of prime importance for the liberation movement to take these facts into consideration,” he added.

Cabral argues that the struggle for national liberation in Africa is a struggle for survival. I would add that the struggle for Africans anywhere in the world is a struggle for survival.

As the great Audre Lorde said in her poem A Litany for Survival: “So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”
For it seems to me that most of us were never meant to survive the 500 years of exploitation and humiliation heaped on us as people of African descent.

We were never meant to survive either enslavement or colonialism.
We were certainly never meant to be free from those abhorrent systems of human degradation.

The fact that we won our freedom and have survived this seemingly endless and ferocious attack places a responsibility on those of us born in Africa or who have Africa within us to write a new page in the history of the planet’s oldest continent.

The fact that our freedom was won against all the odds places a special responsibility on that of us within the belly of the beast to play our part in building this new multilateral world where Africa can take its rightful place at the table alongside the other great civilisations.

That future is one where we not only reclaim our past — largely hidden from history — but where we chart a new way forward that doesn’t simply follow the Eurocentric pathways that are often portrayed as the only way forward.

We can — and will — forge a new pan-Africanism world without waiting for anyone’s permission to do so.

Just as the nations of the Sahel — Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali — are attempting to do. They recognise their common cultural heritage and the way this has been stolen from them by France, the former colonial ruler.

They recognise the need to re-inject pride in that cultural heritage by prioritising local languages such as Hausa over the imposed French.

Renaming the streets in these places from French figures to those of African revolutionary heroes is far from being merely cosmetic.
It helps to promote the importance of struggle and the revolutionary spirit required to win.

But it also makes a statement about the importance of us as Africans in our own right.

Nowhere in the world will we continue to be thought of — if they think of us at all — as victims or afterthoughts. Our history and culture is to be unapologetically celebrated as we build a new pan-Africanism to meet the challenges of the 21st century.