We Africans are quick to anger when we see any act by a European, American, East Asian, Arab, South Asian or Eurasians that could be construed or misconstrued as "racism" directed at Africans or any darker-skinned peoples.
Racism does exist, has existed and I fear will always exist in different forms and varying magnitudes. It is in our nature as human beings; racist attitudes exist between the other so-called races, as well as within them. There are people who believe themselves to be generationally counterpoised warring nations, races or civilizations, but between whom the average African makes no cultural, physical or racial distinction.
With all that said ... we Africans would be better off if we took the energy and militancy we invest in opposing racism from without, and invest instead in dealing with our internal, intra-racial racism against each other. As it is, the greatest single danger to any one African individual or group at any point in history or the present is and has always been another African.
In fact, most of the bad things the other so-called races have done to Africans would not have been possible without the willing participation of Africans.
We are the ones who hunted ourselves and sold ourselves into slavery; the Europeans and Arabs only had to wait in the trading cities on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, or at the southern termini of the Trans-Saharan trade routes, while we brought ourselves to sell to them in exchange for junk.
We Africans vastly outnumbered Europeans in the imperial armies that conquered our continent to create European colonies. We went on to vastly outnumber Europeans in the colonial administrations and (more importantly) the colonial armies.
Indeed, problematic post-colonial relationships, political and economic, persist partly because the most powerful economic, political and social actors in our countries profit from these relationships much as their pre-colonial forebears did.
I do not mean to understate our experience of external racism. We were (and still are) the target of other people's attitudes of racial/cultural/biological/mental/intellectual superiority. The idea that we were subhuman, less intelligent and inferior as a "race" or civilization underpinned a rigid, institutionalized, centuries-long, globalized caste system, that assigned us the third-to-bottom position, ahead only of the aboriginal populations of the Americas, Australia and New Guinea. We were exploited for pecuniary and political gain by the rich and powerful of the supposedly higher caste humans. For sections of the poor and disenfranchised among the alleged higher castes, our lower caste status served as a psychological boost; if they were minnows among their own people, they were at least, in their own minds, minor deities when compared to Africans -- and they acted the part when interacting with us.
Still, most of the crimes committed against Africans by "foreigners" would not have been possible without African participation. And the world has always been a harsh place. Other "races" of people have been put through the torture rack; some "races" (in the Americas and Australian particularly) were damn near exterminated. People have even extended the same viciousness we suffered to people in their own "races".
The depressing fact of life on Earth is that if it is possible for someone to exploit you for their own gain, they will. The onus is on you to create as strong a bubble of security around yourself as possible.
Here again the worst enemy of the African is the African.
I could talk for ages about this problem, but this is a blog. Suffice to say my beloved Nigeria was able to muster hundreds of thousands of men to wage a Civil War against itself, but could not find the military resources to invade and destroy the Apartheid State, thus freeing millions of Africans and sparing Nelson Mandela and the others from wasting so much of their lives behind bars. Even now, we Nigerians are waging various low-intensity wars against ourselves, rather than pull together to catch up with global powers so we are not so exposed and weak by comparison.
We couldn't even do much to help people of African descent elsewhere in world; aside from the fact that we had sold them to slavery in the first place, we were so weak that we were in no position to compel any outside power to treat them better. Indeed, we were conquered easily by those same outside powers.
We were conquered piecemeal, often cooperating with the invading power to conquer neighbours we thought were rivals, only to find ourselves the target of our erstwhile allies once they were done with our neighbours.
It is said that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, we cannot rely on our academics and intellectuals to educate us. Scratch the surface of some of them, and out pours the same intra-racial bigotry you initially thought they would oppose. As for the res, the show all the effects of a colonially-derived education system, sounding exactly like the "development partners", multilateral agencies, NGO-types, foreign entertainers and others who purport to be trying to save Africa; they all talk about us over our heads, and invariably sound, perhaps unconsciously in some instances, as though they thought we were mentally infantile, incapable of lifting a finger (or a brain cell) in our own defence or self-interest, existentially needing their intervention and intercession specifically (and the rest of the world's intervention generally) lest we perish in our helplessness.
If we reacted to our own intra-racial "racism" the way we react when we are the target of external inter-racial racism, our continent would be such a different place. But there is instead a sort of circular reasoning and self-fulfilling prophecy where people view incidents of African-on-African racism as confirmation of their own intra-racial racist beliefs, rather than see them as evidence of a cancer we all must quash.
There are Nigerians (and Africans) who senselessly celebrate when any random black man is elected mayor of some unknown city in Central or Eastern Europe, and who went into ecstasy when a black man (biracial actually) was elected President of the United States. Oblivious to irony, these same Nigerians would NEVER vote a Kanuri man governor of Delta State, or an Ijaw man Senator from Jigawa State. Ask them to do so, and they will indignantly express frightening (and unconstitutional) views about perfidious "non-indigenes" who exist only to deny "indigenes" a chance. Amusingly, if Europeans, Americans, Arabs, Japanese or Southeast Asians were to deny opportunities to Africans in their country on the basis of our being "non-indigenes", the same people would cry racism.
This makes no sense.
What the rest of the world does to us in their countries is of only marginal effect to our fortunes. What we autochthonously do to ourselves in our own countries not only affects the greater mass of African peoples (just shy of a billion), but also diminishes the protections African countries can directly and indirectly offer our people who live outside Africa.
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