in the world. It is extremely diversified, rich in talents and
ingenuity with unlimited resources and potential. It has colonized the
planet and it enriches humanity through inimitable arts. Yet, one
African out of two lives in dismal human conditions. And despite
spectacular progress here and there, it also remains profoundly
socially and culturally conditioned, corrupted, domesticated and
debased by two self-inflicted intellectual and ritual servitudes –
koranic and evangelical - and overwhelmingly regimented, disciplined
and deceived by a host of indigenous erroneous beliefs, faulty dogmas,
half-truths, intoxicating mythologies, life-denying superstitions,
theological entrappings, mystifying fictions, unknown foundational
assumptions, pipe-dreams, fantasies, charlatanisms, junk science and a
flood of nonsense. It is a region, in comparison with other regions,
that is excessively possessed, framed and misled by the unsustainable
dearest fallacies, which keep part of it firmly into the darkness of
ancient times. So what is needed is to make room for some
sustainable, subversive and seditious ideas for the way forward,
building on the authority of self-imposed scientific and technical
rationality, keeping in mind that reason is before all an instrument
of manipulation, deception and cunning, and on the blurred ruins of
western modernities, born out of revolts against outdated and
illegitimate wicked religious and nasty political powers.
The immense power of science should be directed at the 're-
Africanization' of Africa – a region which should be purged from the
worthless rubbles of history - by submitting blind religious faith and
traditional folkloric loyalty to the criticism of reason and move
Africa from the oppression of ancient prejudices to the tyranny of
modern 'neo-Socratic' rationality.
In this regard African policy-makers should recall the ideals of the
French Revolution: down with paternalistic, autocratic and despotic
kings and fear-mongering, deceitful and fraudulent merchant-priests.
Translated into this region at the present time - obscured and
disfigured by foreign metaphysical symbols - on top of the African
agenda freedom thinkers, lovers and fighters should put (1)
'deprivatizing, defragmenting and civilizing African states' and (2)
'desacralizing, secularizing and decolonizing African cultures', for a
less totemic, more cosmopolitan, non-Abrahamic, truly enlightened,
scientifically-informed and much less patriarchal self-determined and
self-empowered post-colony, in search of the superior genuine and
purified meta-African, achieving the highest human possibilities.
Science, which should neither be demonized, idolized or worshiped, has
never been the forte of the spiritually contaminated African human
animal and can never be under current pre-modern overreligious
knowledge systems, particularly science as a way of thinking and as a
method of evidence and reasoning, that, if allowed to run free, would
certainly transform the very cultural underpinning and identity of the
continent. The modernization of these old-fashioned systems, as the
backbones of any mode of modernity, requires in priority the
modernization of our mental and intellectual costumes. This process is
essentially the passage from closed, self-confirming, faith-based,
customary, totalizing or terrorizing knowledge systems – propagated by
bigoted and barbarous ecclesiasts and mysterious 'witch-doctors' - to
essentially liberal, falsifiable, facts-based, scientifically-
established, technically-proven and innovative knowledge systems (not
a single new god in the last 1000 years!!). In these uninhibited
systems scientific knowledge can be construed as a theory of the real
and as a technology of truth and understood as the epistemological
foundation of any form of Afro-modernity. It is also the passage from
the 'Book of Scripture' to the 'Book of Nature' and from the
submission to the white man's colonizing gods to the more authentic
African stuffs.
The key to an African revival or Renaissance is the breaking of the
reigning hegemonic order, basically regulated and sustained by Islam
and Christianity – two medieval phallocratic backward solitudes and
perverted obscurantist establishments – living in the secluded past,
thriving on holy lies, absurd fabrications, fears, mirages, delusions,
false hopes and subservient obedience and, genealogically, on the non-
African narcotics, values and moralities of ancient middle Eastern
'slave' mindsets and worldviews.
Historically, science has proven to be too toxic, troubling,
unsettling or destructive for a region whose knowledge systems are
plagued with spirituo-, mystico-, magico-, abrahamo-, euro- and phallo-
centricity, that excessively seeks comfort in historical debris, bogus
revelations, pseudo prophecies, imaginary deities, ancestors' spirits,
phony limbos, made-up angels, mind-boggling miracles, wonderful
heavens, amazing demons, implausible resurrections…and other strange
and unconscious chimeras, taboos and biases, providing ample material
for Freudian theses. It is a region that fell prey to a gigantic fraud
and misfortune and that babbles abusively in the invention of
hypothetic other-worlds and after-lives, which confines the minds,
poisons or vampirizes life, drags Africans outside nature and denies
or weakens this worldly existence. It also wears down the natural
self, consumes time and precious resources, drains valuable energies,
devalues the body, camouflages the discovery of the earth, lessens
control over natural environments and erects interreligious barriers,
which split communities and undermines Pan-African solidarity.
Uncovering an original Afro-modernity, distinct from the North-
Atlantic style, requires liberating and supporting the few
progressive, autonomous, scientific, secular and free thinkers on the
continent, which entails unashamedly blaspheming in every meeting, on
every wall, on every CoP, network and blogging site, with an
unorthodox radical neo-narrative.
Science in Africa has to become defiantly offensive and utterly
heretical and sacrilegious to be effective and win over the two great
non-African pathetic phallocracies that deplete the African spirit and
vitality and dampen African innovation, as the current state of a self-
alienated region amply demonstrates. Muslim and Christian cosmic
visions and phantasms, masquerading as divine revelations, are not
helpful and absolutely not needed in Africa, as the degree of human
development of Finland, Japan and Singapore, for example, abundantly
demonstrates, for they constitute insidious obstacles to cognitive
development and to the emergence of scientific ways of constructing
and ordering realities. These anachronistic vestigial phallocracies,
oppressive machineries of churches and mosques and institutionalized
captive systems of mental cruelty, where escape is nearly impossible
or statistically insignificant, flourishing on selling the shameless
notion of personal immortality, impact sublimely and negatively on all
aspects of African life, including in unsuspected places, such as in
agriculture where repeated long periods of fasting, numerous religious
holidays, prayers for rain, faith in providence, belief in humans as
supernatural beings, women's banned inheritance and ownership of land,
fear of ungodly bio-engineering, dismissal of scientific facts and
rejection of common-sense truths, etc. are contributing to hunger,
poverty and underdevelopment. They also impact positively in many
respects as they fill a basic human need and provide some soothing
intelligibility to a fundamentally incomprehensible tragic world.
Part of the solution, in addition to economics and politics, for going
beyond the trivial, superficial realities, entrenched mental habits,
close-mindedness, demagogueries, populist pomposity, stubborn views,
narrow provincialism, conventional system of thought, confounding
appearances, mythical taming canons, self-deceptions, self-
flagellation, wishful thinking, intellectual torpor, inflationary
rhetoric, circular or tautological arguments, feel-good meetings and
ceremonial entertainment, is to become compassionately disrespectful
of long-established authorities, roll Imperial-Doctrinaire-
Contemptuous Islam and Hebraic-Pauline-Constantinian-Roman
Christianity out of Africa – two proselytizing religions of decadence
- and battle magical witchcraft and mystical shamanism, which would
open the way to superior insight, understanding and awareness and to a
distinctive version of Afro-modernity, honoring unbelievers and
infidels. This paradigmatic shift toward modern ways of knowing and
acting requires championing the scientific method, the rule of
technique and innovation as well as promoting decisive scientific
arbitrations, increased technical mediations and a redefinition of
STI's relationships with religious, cultural, social and economic
life. For this shift to occur there is a need to better appreciate
modern science, not as a Christian crime, but as a method of both
calculative and subversive thinking and as a means of achieving the
systematic unmasking and renovation of conventional / medieval / pre-
modern realities. This call for re-cosmologizing, re-mythologizing,
're-prophetizing', re-charlatanizing and re-directing the evolution of
a mutilated empirical reality toward a truly 'African' future,
emancipated from the sacred relics of a convoluted history.
African science policy makers have to design sustainable visions,
strategies and policies to let the scientific spirit out of the
bottle, fight medievalism, drive a new relationship between Africa and
the emerging modern cosmos, forge a new engagement with the naked
world, de-technocratize the mostly empty development discourse in
science and practice the science of the 'hammer'.
Jacques L Hamel
Scientific Affairs Officer
UNECA
Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueshamel
jachamel@gmail.com
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