SIR: What is wrong with Africans? Are we genetically inferior to the other races of the world, and consequently, lack the “brain and mental capacity to govern society,” and inevitably, populate “pestiferous holes” that invariably remain “major sources of problems and setback to the entire world”?
The answer is no, absolutely no. The problems of the Black man are not genetic; we are not genetically inferior to any human race. Like any other human race, we have the brain and mental capacity to govern societies and build great countries, and earn the respect and admiration of the other peoples of the world. Our problems are attitudinal and cultural.
As Harry Barnes rightfully noted in his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, “All efforts to prove the superiority of one race or sub-race of man over another turned out unsuccessful.” It is not race, but culture, cultural skills and attitudinal disposition that are most significant in determining human development. The differences in social accomplishment and human development between races, for example, White and Black, are more cultural and attitudinal than genetic. “Race is strictly a physical matter that has no relation to intelligence and cultural attainment.”
In the age when the Greeks and the Romans held sway over the civilised world, the Nordic tribes of Europe – the ancestors of the Germans, English, Danish, etc – were “not civilised into an orderly community.” They were barbarians: the most primitive, barbarous and ferocious Europeans. Although their genetic and racial make-up remained the same, today, they are the most advanced, enlightened, and progressive of all Europeans. What brought the dramatic change in their social accomplishment and human development? It was their culture, traditions, cultural skills and mindset that changed over the centuries.
Despite their dazzling achievements in science, literature, administration and jurisprudence, and reign over the civilised world up till the early centuries of the Christian era, the Romans (Italians), had by the 19th Century degenerated to the point where Napoleon Bonaparte considered them, “ill-suited for freedom, and incapable of self-government.” And “His many contemptuous utterances about Italians are crude and (deprecating) to a point that any historian (will be) embarrassed to quote them.”
The problems of Africans are not racial, but historical, cultural and attitudinal. Thus, like other races that, over historical ages, broke out of their barbarian and crude ways, and into enlightenment and progress, we are muddling our way through a historical phase that pre-stages our evolution of progressive cultures, and cultivation of progressive attitudes, which will propel us to join in the social, political and scientific advancement of the other races of the world. When and how this will happen is up for conjecture.
- Tochukwu Ezukanma,
Lagos