My identity

Most biographies and autobiographies are simple narratives of a person's life. The events described in these true stories are usually those considered as most formative to a person's identity, starting with his birth, the place he was born, the country, going on to give academic achievements and sometimes, non academic activities that the person has been engaged in which tell of the development, expression or formation of this identity. In other words, a biography or autobiography gives to the reader an idea of what the subject really is and how the subject became what he is. With this information in mind, we are better able to understand the whole that we are confronted with in the form of the creations of this same individual. This article, which I head simply as "My Identity", is my autobiography. I do not call it "My Autobiography" because it does not stick to the rules that apply in the writing of an autobiography. It does more than this because, unlike those whose ancestral histories are already recorded in the annals of their respective countries' histories, and the individuals agree with this recorded part of their roots, I do not think that starting from the entity Zambia in my autobiography, the country in which I was born, will give to the reader a true picture of who I really am, and how I became the angry young man that I am today.

The events that have played a role in the shaping of my identity did not start in 1885 in Berlin, when men who were more concerned with human capital and natural resources sat down and shared the spoils of war. They go much farther back than this.

Always aware of this reality, when asked where I come from, except in official encounters where giving the internationally legitimate name of the place where I was born is necessary, I always say that I am from South Africa, not referring to the Republic of South Africa, but to the region where I was born. This is a definition I am much more comfortable with. I will never accept anything less defining of me, my ancestry, and race. Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Angola, or any similar creations have, as far as I am concerned, no historical precedence.

There has never been a tribe, or race of people called Malawi. There are ruins called Zimbabwe, but this says nothing of the people who inhabit the land, not to mention the fact that the so named group of people were never party, consulted, or asked to draw the border lines that delineate their republic. There was a kingdom called Congo, which took over after another that had existed in this region for centuries, called Lunda, which reached its peak and decline under the Mwata Yamvo dynasty, founded by the legendary Cibinda Illunga, was dissolved. East of this, in western Congo, Northern Zambia, Rwanda and Burundi was another pluralistic kingdom called Luba, which also found its demise at the same period. The story is similar in all parts of Africa. What, in view of this history, do we make of the inhabitants of the regions so named? Are we to consider everyone here as descendants of the names they bear today, as creators and creations of the identities and entities they reside in, like, for example German people who actually actively partook in the formation of the land they occupy today, because this, they most certainly are not?

The identity Rwandan, or Nigerian, though an identity in its own right, is not as much an identity as it is a nationality. It requires more validation to prove what a real Nigerian is, what his longtime history is, than it does to prove what, say, an Englishman is. England, though a multicultural society today, is run by, and has all the markings of the English people, a name designating a group that can be traced back though time to a period when they merged into this whole known today as the English. The identity, as well as the nationality, is not disputable, and needs no validation. Rwanda, on the other hand, is similar to a cage housing a lion and a cheetah, each protective of its own history, its kind, its survival, and further more, the two are given no proper chance to settle their differences and get on with the creation of a new identity because of major impediments in the design. It does not take a lot of insight to see the fate of the poor cheetah in this cage.

Though my example compares humans with animals, it is quite accurate if we do not forget the savagery that has marred this land to date, which, despite international efforts to quell the violence, still happens now and again. The state in which Rwandans, or other African peoples find themselves in is regrettable, and has to go if we are to see an end to the misery that has become so integral to our existence. It will go when people see it for what it is; the legacy of colonialism. The border lines, sliced up in Berlin in 1885, served the old colonial masters well, but have constantly stood in the way of the current occupants, whether they are aware of this or not. The regions remain just like the British, French or Portuguese had intended them to be. The whole design was just an invention, a simple delineation of territories given to, and later conquered by the respective greedy group; areas they had no intentions of developing fully if the autochthonous stayed around. The milking of all the wealth, in the name of queen, or sovereign, was all that mattered.

The areas should actually just resort to their old names, formerly, properly called Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Ivory Coast, etc. This would be more realistic. A change in a name without the necessary corrections needed to remove completely the tools of subjugation, and their negative effects on the subjugated, is like a change in name and address of a convicted child rapist. It does not change his true nature, but simply makes him anonymous.

Since they were not redesigned, African republics remain, for all intents and purposes, colonies of the western power to which the sliced piece was given, and, where this may apply, to the allies of these, or, ultimately, to the country that enjoys the most influence at any given time in this group at a given historical period.

This is one of the sad truths about the people in Africa; that they did not regain their identities, nor the power to determine their destinies after independence, hence the misnomer independence. They, however, actually accepted the colonial identities forced on them, new identities into which they have wrung themselves. How adjusted they are to their new identities remains to be told, but suffice to say that the attempt has so far been an absurd joke; the actualization of the best dreams of the colonizing commission.

As far back as 1853, a British minister, Lord Grey, put the agenda of the colonial powers into words. "The true policy I believe to be" he said, "the formation of a regular government on the European model, so that the interference of the British authorities may be less and less required". This policy, known today as neocolonialism, was understood and observed, and on many occasions paraphrased by many colonial authorities in the colonies up till the time that the territories became independent.

A typical example of the resolve of the colonial powers, the ultimate determination to make colonialism a permanent aspect of the African continent is to be found in the works and writings of the person of Gordon Guggisberg, the governor of the Gold Coast from 1919. Believing greatly in the "imperial mother's" mission to help Africans, this governor strived tirelessly to improve the colonial system so as to make it stronger. Guggisberg, who believed the colonial system the only possible system there could be, believed, like his ancestor Lord Grey, that the goal was to make Africans take over, and run it themselves.

The documented activities of the colonial authorities aimed to strengthen colonialism, to make true the ultimate goal. Towards the period that the colonial powers were allowing Africans to form their own political organizations, the presence of colonial officers on the continent was ever on the increase, a fact that is unknown by most people in Africa today. The obvious aim of this was to leave no stones unturned.

In the British colonies, they had more or less made sure that there could be no comebacks. They had had more than enough time to prepare for such a state. The transitional period, the handing over of power to the natives was as a result smooth in their territories. The individuals who led the civil rights movements that fought for equal rights to begin with, were trusted. Later, when these were to show their true colours, they were to be removed by whatever means necessary, as swiftly as was possible. In the French and Portuguese colonies however, the situation was quite different. Here, men whose crime was possibly charisma, intelligence or descent from the original ruling families, were thrown into jail before they had committed any crimes. Police here were instructed to shoot indiscriminately into crowds that gathered for any reason whatsoever. It is impossible to explain this madness any other way than that, given the complexity of the situation, the Portuguese and French felt they had no other option. They felt pushed against a wall. To them, the continuation of the colonial dream called for such drastic, and on the surface, frenzied measures.

The robin was strapped tightly to the biggest tree, and they pulled out its feathers, one by one. The designs that grew out of this "dedicated work" are the African republics we know today. If Lord Grey or Gordon Guggisberg were to return to Africa today, they would immediately recognize the state of the continent as a product of their work, give or take a few flaws here and there.

In today's neo-colonial environment, the brainwashing has become so extensive that many, if not all, equate race with the very geographical division in which they live. A Kenyan is not only a Kenyan because he lives in this area called Kenya, but is also a Kenyan, a race in its own right, even though his own tribe mates reside right there next to him, in the other republics surrounding his own republic, who, except in close tribal encounters, are regarded as other races.

Though many may try to convince the African that the existence of "race" has been disproved, lucid, logical and desirable a utopia as their explanation may be, it is simply rhetoric, if restricted to our times. This is not the standard by which many live, and as the underdog, I know that this is not the way to survive and prosper in a world that operates on double standards.

I regard all those who exhort the third world to live by this "false" standard as agents of the brainwashing commission. I will stick to the eternal truth that "tribe is a human condition". Until such a time that Africans have freed themselves from the ever-present evils that are bound to exist in their present setups, like tribalism, genocide, etc., until such a time that Africans are enlightened enough to know that preaching against tribalism, nepotism and genocide, that bringing those found guilty of such crimes to a human rights tribunal in The Hague will not remove these evils from the face of their respective republics, until they are enlightened enough to see that rhetoric cannot change human conditions, that only a continent-wide movement at decentralization in which tribes become autonomous in a federated Africa, will I, like all the privileged out there, accept the identity that I will get, and proceed, like those who are of Germanic, Slavic, or Latin origin, whose nations are founded on these identities, to write an autobiography that sticks to the rules set for such writing.

Then, and only then will the trouble spots of the continent be brought under control. In such an Africa, tribe will no longer be an issue, since each tribe, or the few wholes formed from all who share similar tribal traits, as is the case with Germany, will rule in its own territory. In such an Africa trading allegiances for pecuniary advantage will no longer be necessary nor possible, a situation in which puppets of foreign interest groups and despots find their bloom, and have easy places to hide. In the present setup, they simply remove their opposition and set social orders in their respective republics that enable the perpetuation of their retarded acts. Citizens of a federal Africa will be subject to a single constitution, to a single legislative organ and the laws that flaw from this. In such an Africa, there will be no corners in which such men will hide, no society they will isolate to plunder at will, under the umbrella of sovereignty. Disputes for pieces of land rich in natural resources will become a relic because the territories will be owned by all in common, and the resources used to the benefit of all.

When this time does finally come, if this time will ever come, I will no longer have to feel ashamed when I say that I come from the country or nation that my own people designed for their own benefit, and though many will disagree with me here, preferring to think that this design is open to sabotage too, and may also become as disagreeable as the present setup, the truth of the matter is that Africa stays backward because the designs it sticks to today are not catered to the needs of Africans. The designs that Africa adheres to were not made nor meant for the benefit of Africans. Besides, if we stick to the law of identity, then they might as well call me, as a resident of this continent that does not lose its sleep over such trivial issues as identity, a Ghanaian, a Nigerian, or even worse, a real South African, still dispossessed and devastated, and becoming more so by the day, a decade after gaining the franchise.

Many would argue here that an identity is an identity, no matter how convoluted the journey to the acquisition of this identity has been, that one cannot pick out certain aspects of the past, and discard others (colonialism in this case) in order to create a new identity. Such an identity would be false, they assert. An identity is rather a taking into account of all the parts that have played a role in its creation.

Still, the various identities that Africans stick to today, and the different mentalities that have resulted, even between members of the same tribes who live in different countries, especially when these countries have different languages, were gained by deceit of the very people who bear the identities. They were forged by denial or stifling of many African truths. The identities that Africans bear today were forced on Africans to exploit the fruits of their labour and the resources of the lands that their ancestors called home. The vilifying of African traditions, the successful attempt to have Africans feel like making distance between themselves and these renounced ways, the replacement with other non African, so-called better ways, and mostly, with nothing at all, was done to force Africans to accept inferiority, a position that aids in the exploitation of Africans since, when in the grips of this complex, it makes the Africans accept the primacy of western interests, western ways, and ultimately, western orders.

Seen as such, being ashamed of such an identity is not wrong for me, especially when the aims of those who made the identities still prevail. A group's identity, rather, the kind of identity that I will readily accept, has to be one made by my own people for the benefit of my own people, after they have redeemed themselves from the deceit they have been forced to live by, and have redesigned their societies according to an order they know will benefit all, using the past not as a model, but as a guide to the formation of these new identities. The goal is to stay who we are come what may, and manage our lives so that nobody can take advantage of us. Staying who we are requires knowledge of who we are. A man who doesn't know who he is cannot know how to maintain that which he is. Oblivious to his true nature, he can go whichever way the wind blows since self-monitoring's prerequisite is "prior self knowledge". If I do not know myself, but someone else does know who I am, then I will forever stay at the other's whims. If we Africans no longer know who we are, which is obviously the case, then the clue to this we will find in our ancestors, their ways, their institutions, etc. They are, after all, this version we carry around with us. They are us at a later date, to put it awkwardly. Ultimately, this identity will have to be forged on a few cues.

Making this same statement, Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga, the man who conceived and developed the ceremony known as Kwanzaa, in a more lucid fashion than I have done above, or even Marcus Garvey had managed to do when he said that a nation with no knowledge of its history (and culture) is like a tree without roots, outlined the importance of being able to relate to the past in order to understand the present and deal with the future. "A people" he wrote, "will never look forward to posterity who never looked backward to their ancestors." The genius of this man did not end here. He did not restrict his activities to standing on the pulpit to criticise his fellow Afro-Americans for their lacks, or condemn them when they did not realise the extent of the exploitation they were exposed to by corporate America during the Christmas season, which disregarded their weaker economic positions, by inviting them to spend, weakening them even further in this frenzy that demands spending from even the most poor in the west. Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga went to work and came up with a creative alternative that not only offered Afro Americans freedom from this oppression, but gave them a chance to celebrate a holiday specific to their own needs. In Kwanzaa, they could find and appreciate their roots. Kwanzaa allows them to celebrate the season without shame or fear of embracing their history, their culture, and themselves.

Today, millions, including Africans, observe the nondenominational event of Kwanzaa, and realise that it is not simply a celebration restricted to the season of the earth's renewal, but a way of life.

Living in Europe today, a thoroughbred African, I like to believe that there are no similarities in Africa with the situation of Afro-Americans that require such redemption. Most of us still have a similar ceremony in place, right? And yet I find Kwanzaa more attractive than my own culture's ceremony which, though also very much alive, and very much rooted in the realities of life, though also first harvest celebrations, which, at base, Christmas actually is, still has to be elevated to the spiritual level and apparent relevance of this Kwanzaa, which it does possess at base, but no effort has been made to bring this truth into our western educated households, leaving us open to the invasion of Christmas and its money hungry, western corporate interests. My people's culture has been studied in depth, and put into books, but no attempt has been made to make it a part of our everyday lives again, like it was before, but, when this deciphering has been achieved, the material learnt has rather been the stuff of esoteric text books, material that is more useful to western linguists and anthropologists than for Africans. My own group's harvest celebrations have as of yet to attain the level and popularity that Christmas enjoys in my own country, south of the Sahara where the actual first harvest celebrations practised in various cultures of Africans who live here happen at a time other than the time that this Christmas season is observed.

Rather than proceed to criticize my own society for this lapse, knowing that they live in prisons where nothing makes sense anymore, where apathy weighs everybody down; mostly run by warders who did not create the prisons, but run them on behalf of other parties, and do not appreciate the function of rehabilitation of this penal system, but know of pain, and exercise no restraint in its use to control the convicts; I will take the example set by Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga and hope that eventually I will come up with a method, like he did, not to use the channels Africans are using today to right perceived wrongs in their respective communities, those channels that were not designed to help their societies right their wrongs, but are themselves the impediment; but to remedy the situation through such simple creativity, knowing the normative nature of the written word and the power I possess as one who has the gift of its effective use, or am the beholder of the means to its dissemination; to sidestep all of these impediments and create a similar movement that simply wins the favour of my kind by its obvious rewards, knowing, like Karenga obviously knew, that there are receptive ears out there who will not let a good thing pass them by once they have seen and recognized it as such. This method is what has made us survive slavery and colonialism. This is the only part of our culture, unlike the western institutions that we have inherited, that cannot be infiltrated and used against us.

This is how a conscious is created. This is how a culture is created. This method may turn out to be the route to a true revolution in Africa. Soon, we may see such creative minds coming together and creating disciplines which will form the basis for the education of future generations, curriculums that cater to the needs of Africans. Given this head start, our descendants will hit the ground running, without the disadvantage that many of us had before we discovered these truths. Standing on our shoulders, the levels of creativity to which our progeny can rise, when raised by and within the very best creations of our most creative individuals, is boundless.

My ancestors, from my mother and father's side came to this region as refugees, and not, as history wrongly states, as heroic immigrants in search of new land to conquer and rule over.

Why do mass migrations occur? Certainly not for the heroic reasons that the history books attribute to the era that my ancestors roamed this part of the earth, and, in the case of my ancestors, they were certainly not done for conquest when the people involved lived in large empires or kingdoms that were dissolving at the moment in question. Shortage or disaster, tragedy and misery are almost always the reasons that mass migrations occur. Why my people moved in large numbers southwards when there is no evidence of any of the above-mentioned reasons as causes, when originally, by nature, they were not nomads, remains to be fully explained.

I hope this evokes in your imagination an image of BBC reports of women and children, in Yugoslavia's Bosnia Herzegovina, or Rwanda, traversing long distances in search of shelter from violence. This is how I think it was for my people, and for many people in this region who just haven't been told the truth about their origins, and the conditions under which they migrated to their new, and present, homes.

My father's family came to this region at a much earlier time, when the Lunda kingdom was dissolved because of the change of power balance that the transatlantic slave trade brought. Groups that engaged in slavery became better armed than those that did not, and ultimately took control of the lives of these others.

As victims of the transatlantic slave trade, my ancestors left marks on all parts of this planet, from the Kachasa spirit distributing groups we find today in Latin America, to the Kamwendo claiming groups in Suriname, to Cinque, a disillusioned royal who, in reacting to the tricky, power usurping and legendary figure of Cibinda Illunga, my direct ancestor, moved with his followers to the coastal region of Angola, and, for some time was innocently engaged in trade with the Portuguese. He even travelled the seas with them on some occasions. There is evidence that proves that he went as far as the Cape Verdi islands, and even reached the southern tip of Africa on some of these trips. He even had children with Portuguese women. Though the Portuguese held him in high regard, racism being an ideology that would only develop in the future, they betrayed him when the value he represented to them as a slave became greater than his value to them as a friend. He was tricked and strapped into a ship and shipped to the new world, where he left his mark on history in the well known "Amistad Mutiny", a likely event because Cinque was quite versed in the ways of sea vessels, and the white men who commanded the vessels. As a slave on one such ship, he was an accident waiting to happen.

His remarkable participation in his own defence during the trial that would ultimately win him his freedom was also not an accident. Cinque was the product of a society that already had a complex writing system, and a legal system whose level, when viewed in historical perspective, was rather advanced for its time, if not more advanced than the system in which Cinque became a defendant.

This Cinque, whose actual name is Cinguli, was not a former Congolese prince as most history books claim, but a prince from the well-known Lunda Empire that was geographically centred in the same area that the Congo empire later took hold in, hence the mistaken origin. Cinguli was not captured from the coasts of Congo, but from Angola, by the Portuguese. His friends at the time, who were both black and white, were told when they grew worried at his sudden absence that Cinguli and his followers had migrated to an island settlement off the coast of Angola. This is the explanation that the oral history of his people still gives.

Cinguli was given the very freedom he so desired in the end, but was however shortchanged. He was taken back to Africa all right, but not to the Africa he came from. Cinguli was dispatched in Sierra Leone. History books state that his family and friends had been sold into slavery. This was probably an attempt to conceal the obvious. The legal system of a mighty and influential America had promised this man freedom. Here was a man of regal descent. Finding anyone at all who knew him, who, in an Africa that was peopled with groups who had close blood relationships, in an Africa that never forgot its rulers and had heard of them hundreds of kilometres away, would have been very easy indeed. The fact that the incident is reported may well lie in the nature of the man. Considering his vociferous nature, Cinguli obviously made this fact known through the channels available to him, channels he probably demanded remain available, and had been promised. This was after all, at the time, no ordinary shipment

The fact of the matter is that his tribesmen or family hadn't all been sold into slavery. They existed in another part of Africa.

At the time that Cinguli was probably holding his head in despair in Sierra Leone as the realisation set in that, though the people here were black, they were not his people, that though this was Africa, it wasn't the savannahs he had roamed around in, and this time definitely afraid of white people and their ships to try too hard to return to his homeland using their help, his brother Cinyama, who had also left the royal residence in Lunda in protest, was making his new home in the area between Angola, Zambia and present day Congo.

Not a small world for our friend Cinguli in these times, but it is indeed a small world for me by virtue of the fact that my history is meticulously recorded by the group I belong to, thanks to the fact that my group had written language before contact with the west, and the folklore and oral history built around the royal families, and the effort taken by individuals within the group to record this history in written form today.

It should actually have been very easy for everybody else to know where they come from if they had all this time lived according to their own designs. If they had not had their history replaced by the history of an entity that has only existed since the west created it, they would not have to go to a particular village, to a particular elder citizen, with enough intact memory, to learn of their roots. The whole story would be alive and around them all the time.

Though this knowledge of history is fast becoming more and more vague, as the people who have access to this information are becoming fewer and fewer, and soon will disappear altogether, it is still not too late for the majority of Africans (read an article on this site by Nghlanganiso Dladla to get a better idea of the depth of this problem. Click here).

My mother's side re-migrated as a result of the more recent Katanga upheavals, when they became Tshombe's enemies.

Both families, however, are coincidentally descended from founding groups of the Lunda Empire.

I lived in Zambia till my late teenage years, when, while at the University, studying civil engineering, I was offered a scholarship in Czechoslovakia, then still in the Eastern block. Even though I could only be accepted at a veterinary school there, I gladly accepted and left my favourite subject, engineering, for a course I had no interest in - I was after all getting a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel abroad. While in Czechoslovakia, my course was changed to economics, decisions I think the commies made because they felt it essential that they brainwash as many of us as they could. Veterinarians are hardly seriously introduced to Eastern Political Science, which was the aim of the whole scholarship program after all; each side wanting to indoctrinate as much of the world as they possibly could with their ideology in this era of the cold war. Fellow students whose courses were changed at the last minute put up incredible fights, gave ultimatums, and acted when these were not met, until they were re-instituted to their old courses. Unfortunately, and this I regret to this day, I did not put up a fight. Even a letter from my parents advising me to take immediate action did not change this. I simply stood aside and watched, stoically, as others decided my life for me.

I graduated from the university in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, in 1988, and moved to Germany. I learnt the German language in preparation for study at the university there, but left Germany for Holland to join a friend who claimed it was much better there for foreigners wishing to continue with their studies. No truth came of this, but before I lost interest in educational achievements, I had acquired one more degree in psychology.

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