I Think like an African-The African brain has to be defended at all costs

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I think like an African
http://www.africasia.com/services/op...&title=orakwue

Not in Black or White
by Stella Orakwue - April 2007


Protecting the African brain is a task that we have to set our minds to from now on. It is a vital necessity. It has to be done irrespective of the hours, years, or pain expended. The African brain has to be defended at all costs.

What do I mean by “the African brain”? The African brain is a brain that Europeans are jealous of. Why? Because it has multiple capacities, it is infinitely flexible, and it works and works and works. On and on and on, like a computer with infinite versions of the finest, highest quality software. Needless to say, the African brain is bloody clever. Pointless to tell how others crowd around it in envy, hostility, seething silence, or racist jealousy, wanting to know why they haven’t got one like it.

We have to protect our brains. And I do not mean wear a helmet or put on a seat belt or eat the right foods or get enough sleep or do exercise or get enough mental stimulation like good conversation fit enough for your brain’s capacity. Nope, I mean protect your brain from outside human attackers. Insidious, invidious, dangerous, cunning, ignorant freakish brain terrorists, whose aim is to infiltrate your mental capacities.

Who are they, these brain terrorists? You might not know. Where are they? They could be everywhere. What will they do? You’ll know when they have disappeared into the gloom of their existences. What harm have they come to do? Destruction is the game they play. Will it be a nightmare? Yes. But you will see the mornings again if you protect your brain.

They want to disillusion and depress people who strive. Destroying that which must not succeed. To stop a person in their tracks who might be making more progress than they would like. As an African, you might possess a brain that is too good for Africans. They want it for themselves, for their own use, to serve their own purposes and not yours, and certainly not your people’s or your nation’s needs.

Working out how the human brain actually works is not my field of research. Neuroscience is the new science of the present and it is the future. Neuro-psychology is also emerging on the scene. Both these brand new disciplines have led me to start pondering over what researchers might want with the African mind. What will they want to find out about us?
What kinds of “research” will they want to conduct on our brains? What will they want to “know” about Africans?

It is assumed that the mind is located in the brain. Both the conscious mind and the unconscious. And that makes sense, does it not? One could hardly believe that our minds are in our stomach or hidden in our thighs. But the problem is that we give more time and thought to the state and size of our stomachs and thighs than to the state of our minds and brains. Why is this? Is it because we cannot see what we are doing – or what others are doing – to and with our brains?

You might say that there is no such thing as a mind associated with a race. But I would have to strongly disagree. We talk, as Africans, of “the European mind”, and we know that Europeans have also talked verbosely of “the African mentality” or “the Arab mind”. Yes, I do believe that the mind has, takes on, racial characteristics. That each race has its own mental dispositions. Race and mindsets go together. Different racial groups, different minds. “Going native” meant more than wearing “vulgar” African attire. I do not think like Europeans and I do not expect a European to think like me.

I said earlier that Europeans have long talked about “the African mentality”, but the African brain, the African mind is the least analysed of all racially grouped minds. The European colonisers and Western “thinkers” and philosophers thought that they “knew” us in more than the biblical sense. But we always knew, and know, that what they knew is what they wanted to know. It was, and is, what they already thought. What they needed to believe. Their causes were colonisation and superiority and money. Their effects were our physical and mental enslavement. Very profitable for their concerns.

They knew nothing about our minds but constructed what they wanted to believe and then foisted that construct on us in order for us to be what they wanted us to be. And so many of us bought that and went along with that. Fools. Do we really think that much has changed?

Our minds were previously looked at only to support racism and to support money-making enterprises. Globalised slush is capitalism’s need to make billions and billions in excess profits. We were never analysed for the betterment of ourselves. We were not thought to possess a conscious or unconscious of “high” enough quality – we were a base people, were we not? With base minds. What could possibly be in our conscious or unconscious that was worthy of serious study? Western analysis was for themselves! Millions of them.

I do not speak here simply of psychoanalysis when I use the term “analysis”. When I speak of the proper analysis of the African mind and brain that has never been done, I speak of pure reason and thought. A deep, critical thinking of how we, as Africans, think and reason. Of how what makes sense to us makes sense to us and not to others. Of how what makes sense to others is complete nonsense to our own ways of thinking.

However, on the subject of analysis as psychoanalysis, let me just say something that I have thought for many years: God created Professor Sigmund Freud for the Americans. And Freud saved their minds. Without his invention of psychoanalysis, and the application of his techniques by his disciples and dissidents, Americans would have lost their minds in their millions throughout the 20th century.

Today, it is a knee-jerk reaction for Western people to go into mental institutions when they have the slightest troubling of their minds. Even if many of these places do not have a sign saying “mental hospital” on the front gate, and the people going in say they are going into “re-hab”.

But God loved us black people and gave us freeness! God gave the African laughter. He knew that we would be robbed of the buckets of money for costly psychoanalytic therapies, so he gave us the instant smile, the coming laughter, the ready upturn at our mouths’ corners. This gift meant that even – especially – when disaster struck, bad people doing bad things turned up, sad news arrived, the African brain will absorb it and then communicate to the mind the order to smile or laugh or joke. A self-generating mechanism. In-built. Free at source, free at the point of delivery. Mind saved.
The happy, smiling, grinning nigger was God’s in-joke on the racists who made – and make – black people’s lives hell and then taunt us for our good nature, despite the miseries we encounter so frequently.

And God’s punchline? Why, the smiling African, the laughing African, the grinning African is very often a serious African with a deadly efficient brain. Mess with them and you take your life into your hands – and those who do so do not value their lives highly.

How long did it take Western doctors to work out the beneficial effects of laughter for a healthy mind? Perhaps they should prescribe a comedian to serve their national health needs. Because here is a free prediction: depression and other mental illnesses will rise exponentially in Europe, America and other Western countries over the next few years. This I promise you. Watch the next couple of decades.

Now, you will ask me: Well then, what do I think is inside the African mind that makes it “African” and not, say, “Slavic”? It’s simple: We think differently. We process information differently. Anybody who observes the brain at work can observe how different people of different colours work differently. And you do not even need scans and electrodes and brain mapping equipment to see that.

The African mind is fresh, vigorous, rigorous. The African mind with a good brain at its helm is working anew in new ways in this our new century. We have at our disposal the minds of our ancestors, our thinkers, our philosophers, our griots, our freedom fighters, from aeons ago and from not so long ago. We have what they set down on paper and what they spoke to our grandmothers and our grandfathers. And many lucky ones amongst us have what our fathers and mothers told us. Such a wealthy, rich inheritance to build upon.

How the mind works is biology’s final frontier. But I am quite sure that neuroscientists, under the guise of “scientific research”, will end up developing this new science for marketing purposes. They will be asking what is inside our brains that can help global capital sell more. African brains will be studied and used to find out how they can market to, and make money from, untapped African purchasing power. Neuroscience and neuro-psychology will not be developed to help us. African brains for Africans will not be on their brains. I have not finished with this subject.

PS: Mr J. Tells me that my delivery of the riots joke in my March column is better than it reads. “That, Mr J., is because instead of ‘where would you put the Kool Aid?’, it should be: ‘where did you put the Kool Aid?’. The man is going nowhere if James Brown is on TV.”

~Now You Know. What Now?
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