adminItai Chapunza
THE mistake most young people make is thinking that fast internet and technology can replace the wisdom of the old people around them. Some think because it is easier to get degrees now and knowledge is more readily available that they can replace the wisdom of the fathers. This is largely because of the influence of present day role models for individuals and for nations.
The role models for most young people are musicians and wealthy people who do not resemble a Godliness about them. In some cases these people openly reject God. The role models for developing countries are a lot of these seemingly good nations that crush religion, but because they do it in a subtle manner it seems ok. We blindly look up to this without regarding the level of moral decay they exist in, in the particular nation.
Africa works so hard to throw away their nature of being social because a few of us went to Europe, saw how everyone is striving to be a one-man band and we come back home and try and implement that. So we start to distance ourselves from neighbours.
In African culture, you greet everyone you meet, more so one that is older than you. But the culture we import tells us, “We don’t owe them anything”. As a matter of fact, we do owe our elders a lot. We owe them for allowing us to grow, we owe them respect, it only benefits us to respect them. We owe them honour because biblically it elongates the number of days we exist.
Honouring our elders does not only elongate our days, it makes better the quality of the days. We young people would do well to take an example from our old men. Copy the good, absorb the wisdom they speak and honour them. But because of the way majority of people of colour think, we quickly see the bad in our elders. Their mistakes are burnt into out memory like hot branding on cows. Their good quickly disappears from our minds.
We have billions of African role models, Captain Thomas Sankara is one. Thomas Sankara “the Burkinabe” as popularly known was the President of the Burkina Faso in 1983 until his assassination on 15 October 1987. At the time he came to power the country still retained its colonial name, Upper Volta and he changed it to Burkina Faso which means “Land of Upright Man”. Sankara was passionate about raising the standard of living for his people as a majority of them were still very oppressed by the systems put in place by French colonialists. He felt that those that came into power after the French had left maintained the oppressive grip on the people of Burkina Faso.
So he sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 which was the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time the official service car of the ministers. That way they were closer in status to the people they led. He reduced the salaries of well-off public servants, including his own, and forbade the use of government chauffeurs and 1st class airline tickets for government officials. The nation still had feudal Lords that controlled vast lands. He redistributed land from them to the peasants. After this wheat production increased from 1 700 kilograms per hectare to 3 800 kgs per hectare making the country food self-sufficient. President Sankara hated foreign aid. His philosophy was “he who feeds you, controls you”.
He spoke against neo-colonialist as a method the West was using to penetrate and control Africa and her people. He called for a united front of African nations to repudiate their foreign debt. He argued that the poor and exploited did not have an obligation to repay money to the rich and exploiting. With such big opinions, the west did not like Sankara. In Ouagadougou, the nation’s capital Sankara converted the army’s provisioning store into a state-owned supermarket open to everyone. This became the first supermarket in the country. Although some of his methods of getting results were not so comfortable for the upper class of the nation, he was a leader very focused on development.
He forced well-off civil servants to pay one month’s salary to public projects. His office air conditioning was removed on the grounds that such luxury was not available to anyone but a handful of Burkinabés. While most presidents try to loot as much as they can in their time in power, Captain Sankara did the opposite. He lowered his salary to $450 a month and limited his possessions to a car, four bikes, three guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer. The rest of the things he used were state owned.
Suit and tie is normal attire for public servants, but that is western. So Sankara required public servants to wear a traditional tunic, woven from Burkinabé cotton and sewn by Burkinabé craftsmen. Because he was a soldier, physical fitness was engraved in him. He was known for jogging unaccompanied through Ouagadougou in his track suit and posing in his tailored military fatigues, with his mother-of-pearl pistol. Like a soldier. When asked why he didn’t want his portrait hung in public places, as was the norm for other African leaders, Sankara replied: “There are seven million Thomas Sankaras”. An accomplished guitarist, he wrote the new national anthem himself.
The young people of Africa learn very little from such iconic Africans. We tend to overlook their efforts. We tell ourselves if it is not inventing space crafts and walking on the moon then it is not significant. Imagine how far we have come because of people like Captain Sankara. His humility is second to none, it’s rare even in this age to find a leader like him. Our colonial master did not allow us to learn to read and write, yet it is not even a luxury to learn to read and write. Literacy is a basic human right. These people deprived our ancestors a basic human right. Our colonial master did not allow us to own anything.
We could not own a small portion of land. Think about this, even if you had enough money and assets, you were not allowed to purchase land in your nation of birth. Instead they kept it to themselves, their reason was simple, skin colour. So they got on a boat, sailed to Africa, and when they landed, they used guns to tell us what we could buy and what we couldn’t.
When we demand the land back they in turn rush to the justice systems they created and say they demand compensation for the land we are grabbing from them. That is madness. The land is ours. We are Africans, they are not. It’s like this, I come to your home then use force to take your car for my personal use. After a while, you then come and demand your car back, then I refuse and insist it is my car. You then use force to take the car.
Then I say I want to be compensated by you for taking the car that is mine. We must learn from those that have done it ahead of us. Love your nation, work hard, be humble and most importantly, don’t allow anyone to oppress you, you are a child of God.
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