If Oyinbo didn't come to educate us, we will be running around in bush with only leaves covering our private parts, speaking to one another in sign languages and completely lacking in every knowledge of God and social decency.
But thank God they came, now I have a God, clothes to wear, I can speak in English language and I can even use a computer. What an advancement.
We should forget that there was a textile industry before the Whiteman came. We should forget that he wasn't the one who taught us how to make dresses and cover nakedness. But years after we received his benevolent intervention in our lives, we still have to import clothes from him because we can't build a textile industry. We are too primitive to be able to do that. So, we decide to suspend our own brain, refuse to create our own textile industry from what he has taught us. We allow him to sell to us, I guess, as a means of thanking him for helping us to discover that we were naked. If not for him, we wouldn't be wearing clothes, so why should we complain that we don't have a textile industry today?
Some of the benefits that the Whiteman brought to us is to help us to know that there is a river that passed through our land. He discovered the River and called it River Niger. Before he came, those dwelling in the area didn't know that there was a river there. They were probably just walking on dry ground until Mungo Park saw it and told them "here, this is a river". Yoruba called it Odò Oya before Mungo Park mind you.
We should forget that there was a social order, system of economy and social philosophy when they came.
We should forget that we had a language and a form of wisdom.
We should just assume that we were primitive, we were just giving birth and growing and dying with absolutely no understanding of our environment. We knew nothing but witchcraft and bloody human sacrifices and killing of twins. We were completely evil.
This is the comfortable posture to take in order to sustain the argument that we must thank the Whiteman for coming to our aid.
And when we take that posture, anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is passing a known boundary. We need to remind him of our history so that we can collectively be grateful to the Whiteman.
How dare you not accept with happiness the grace of the Whiteman considering the wretchedness and darkness that he has brought up from.
How do you speak with a person who sees himself from this lens? What can you say to him about evolving our native wisdom for our common good in this 21st century, when according to him, there is nothing behind to go back to and evolve. Everything behind should be completely abandoned, in fact, we should run far from it. We should keep learning from the Whiteman how he built his society so that we can build our own too after his pattern.
But I tried to learn from history how the Whiteman built his own society and I discovered that it is by going from place to place asserting his dominance under the authority of his own God (religion).
I discovered that his drive for economic imperialism can make him go to whatever height of in his desire to be rich.
The person who thinks we should be like the Whiteman will therefore be suggesting that we (Africans) should look for a race to colonize and feed on their resources.
How does he propose that we should learn from the Whiteman (himself) who doesn't want us to grow to be an economic competition for him?
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