Disenchanting Africa - Latest Posting

8/8/2019 Disenchanting Africa - Latest Posting

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Africa is perhaps the most culturally imaginative and creative region 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 unsustainable 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, self-

deception and cunning, and on the blurred ruins of western modernities, born

out of revolts against outdated and illegitimate wicked religious and political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 thetyranny 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 terrorizingknowledge 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 mans 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 resurrectionsand

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, drainsvaluable 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 agriculturewhere repeated long periods of fasting, numerous religious holidays, prayers for

rain, faith in providence, belief in humans as supernatural beings, womens

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.

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 tamingcanons, 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 innovationas well as promoting decisive scientific arbitrations, increased technical

mediations and a redefinition of STIs 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 andpolicies to let the scientific spirit out of the bottle, fight medievalism, drive a new

relationship between Africa and the emerging modern cosmos, forge a newengagement with the naked world, de-technocratize the mostly emptydevelopment discourse in science and practice the science of the hammer.

Jacques L Hamel Scientific Affairs Officer

Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueshamel [email protected]

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