OUR STATE OF MIND

"I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation."

The quote above went viral in India’s cyberspace in 2008. It is purported to have been extracted from a speech delivered in the British Parliament on February 2, 1835 (exactly 179 years today) by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), a member of the British royalty, historian and politician, who played a crucial role in introducing English and Western concepts of education to India. Though there have been divided arguments as to whether Baron Macaulay actually made the statement, what cannot be denied is that Western concepts were carefully formulated and designed to erode existing rich cultural and spiritual existence of every colony once claimed by the Europeans, be they British, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, German or Spanish.

Macaulay also stated in his Minutes on Education that “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” So I ask: How does the former differ in form and function from the latter?  Worse still, a colonial officer who held the view that “a single shelf of good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” could either be speaking out of ignorance or a genuine and deliberate intention to subdue a people through cultural immersion. 

   

More than the physical conquests witnessed in the former colonies, European countries were mental conquistadores! This explains why virtually all former colonies are the so-called developing countries, while European colonizers are the developed nations. Here in Nigeria, we are a poorly cloned imitation of Western ideals. We used to live in communities where common goals, virtues and a sense of togetherness were core values. Our traditional and religious institutions preached and practiced peace. Respect and responsibility were taught as incentives earned through doing good, where honest ambitions were met with opportunities. We might not have recorded our cultures and traditions in the form of books, but does that invalidate who we are and don’t we have a responsibility to teach our history, culture and traditions to our offspring? 

Foreign adherents, who, for administrative convenience, embedded their ideologies into how the message of religion was relayed to us, introduced both Christianity and Islam. By selling religion to us, they sold to us also, the false belief that their socio-cultural ideologies were the ideal, the accepted.  Both religions do not preach violence and killing one another; it was the proponents of the religions who killed us, subverted our consciousness and stole our resources. Today, we throw away all that is ours that is good and accept hook, line and sinker foreign ways, which ideology we do not fully grasp. Our leaders have cloned the darkest practices of that era and have only replaced the colonial masters by mimicking their avaricious actions.

  

Of course, cultures must mix. The world is a global village, but our traditional ways of drawing elders together for conflict resolution and parley should not be discarded as is being done now for brute force and lawlessness, under the guise of democracy. Our consciousness has been enslaved, thereby making it a device to be tuned at will to any desired frequency. Today, nobody teaches or writes about our pre-colonial heritage. Indeed, our history has been ‘edited’ to begin with when colonialists set foot on our land and crushed our awareness. We cannot know where we are going unless we know where we are coming from. We would do well to retrace our steps.

The West appreciates the lessons learnt from their mistakes and experiences and is weary, lest they be repeated again.  This is the reason for their development and they are so much better for it. We would do well to take a leaf out of that book as the games we play now, the way we toy with our lives and our futures will come to haunt us if a great care is not taken in forging the way forward.