What has happened to AFRICA is better seen in the degeneracy that has gripped those parts of the continent as in Nigeria, which have adopted Islam as a religion and sharia law..
In our not too distant past, we WOMEN were EMPOWERED. we had POWERS EQUAL TO MEN only restricted in their fields of responsibility, domains no man had a right to enter, juriscate, without consent of us. We women were as GREAT, if not greater in power to men in society. Most African societies were MATRIARCHAL. Any leadership role where inheritance was the key to eligibility went through our FEMALE BLOOD FIRST.
Our True-story knows of GREAT WOMEN RULERS, who rose to power not by usurping, but because they were the designated. Any one who knows our True-Story knows of women leaders, and knows that there was really NO SEXISM in our selection of leaders.
Come Christianity, come Islam, and notice how we AFRICAN women suddenly enjoy the same rights as our counterparts in the west. Notice how, coincidentally, we also NO LONGER ARE GREAT WOMEN LEADERS like before the western cultures.
With the advent of western culture, we AFRICAN women became DISENFRANCHISED, we lost our designate roles in society, and as such, our powers, only to fall worse beneath men than our western counterparts in our time, and this result is not surprising. We have inherited western cultures, but only the worst aspects of it, which we cannot even improve upon because western cultures haven't been adopted in their entirety, for us to comprehend the culture, for this process to start.
For a better understanding of what is wrong within western cultures which has changed our way of life, we need to take out an aspect of western culture, the core of the culture itself: language.
WESTERN LANGUAGES, unlike our own, are known to BE SEXIST, even RACIST. This is the reason why many people have argued the futility of fighting sexism in society without confronting the root cause of language, in which it is ingrained.
Actually, everything bad that we know and experience of the west is ingrained in the very languages their minds developed, and expressed in the western institutions designed through (with the help) these languages.
This is how it works: a western mind makes a language, in the case of the English we see a sudden advancement as a result of contacts with the Romans, then the French, ingraining in it his own view of the world (racist, fascist, sexist)<< this is not intended as derogatory, just a real state. He later makes religions and institutions with this same tool, which become infested with his outlook.
MANY AFRICAN LANGUAGES ARE FREE FROM THESE TRAITS, having gotten rid of them in the distant past. In most AFRICAN languages, "woman" is a noun that is known, but curiously, adjectives, pronouns; articles, which indicate gender, are not known.
When you are describing a person doing something in most African languages, you do not indicate their gender: e.g. "she" went to school. Both Men and Women will use the same pronoun. The gender of the actor can mostly be guessed from the context.
Do not let any stiff-necked FOOL convince you that this is a sign that AFRICAN languages are primitive. AFRICAN languages possess within their repertoire an overabundance of nouns for other creatures, sometimes more so than western languages. This, coupled with a few other facts, reveals that the absence of gender in indirect speech is contrived, not an issue of development.
THIS ABSENCE OF GENDER IN AFRICAN LANGUAGES IS A REFLECTION OF ACCEPTANCE OF EQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES, which Africans made when confronted with the issue several thousand years ago, which our western and Middle Eastern counterparts still have to go through. This is the reason their women were not free yet as free as we AFRICAN women were before contact with them, and in many ways, western women still enjoy subordinate status to their men.
This is the reason we went back in time right after we adopted their culture. This is why, today, our BLACK men exploit us, insult us, ridicule us etc... This mentality comes parcel packed with the cultures, which we have adopted.
THE EXCHANGE OF CULTURES HAS MEANT A BACKWARD MOVEMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE. We have unwittingly given up past advancements, and, the irony of it is that the very people who were less advanced than us have become our teachers in a field we excelled in.
It is obvious that these problems will remain, as long as we do not realize the route cause, as long as we do not look at ourselves thorough TIME and see how we were before they came, and compare this with how we are NOW. THE ONLY SOLUTION IS A COMPLETE REJECTION OF ALL THE THINGS WE HAVE INHERITED FROM THE WEST. If we do not do this, we will be surprised how much like them we will become by the day, even WORSE, and this is something we do not want,
now is it?<<<KNOWLEDGE is POWER read "
Susu Economics" pub. by
www.1stbooks.com Read "
A History of Racism"
www.xlibris.com www.barnesandnoble.comSANKOFA!Kelani-
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